Gwyllm.com

“I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment, while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance that I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn.” – Henry David Thoreau
Sunday… late. I have been assembling this over the last couple of days, and found a new poet in the process. Sweet Reward. I think you might like the selections of this entry.
Bright Blessings,

Gwyllm

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On The Menu:

The Links

Solar Fields – The Road To Nothingness

Henry David Thoreau Quotes

The Tale Of The Hashish Eater & The Tale Of Two Hashish Eaters

The Poetry Of Yahia Lababidi

Yahia Lababidi Biography

Solar Fields – Dust

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The Links:

The Easter Island Cave Complex…

Why Won’t God Heal Amputees?

Lightening And The Beginnings Of Life?

Dorset Ridgeway’s Killing Field: Vikings? Locals?

British Pagan Police When Holiday Rites/Rights….

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Solar Fields – The Road To Nothingness (with thanks to Lizard Jah….)

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Henry David Thoreau Quotes:
“A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.”

“Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.”

“As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.”
“Be true to your work, your word, and your friend.”
“Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.”
“Cultivate the habit of early rising. It is unwise to keep the head long on a level with the feet.”
“Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.”
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….Then said she, “Know that I mean to pass this night with thee, that I may tell thee what talk I have heard and console thee with stories of many passion-distraughts whom love hath made sick.” “Nay,” quoth he, “Rather tell me a tale that will gladden my heart and gar my cares depart.” “With joy and good will,” answered she; then she took seat by his side (and that poniard under her dress) and began to say: — Know thou that the pleasantest thing my ears ever heard was
The Tale Of THe Hashish Eater
A certain man loved fair women, and spent his substance on them, till he became so poor that nothing remained to him; the world was straitened upon him and he used to go about the market-streets begging his daily bread. Once upon a time as he went along, behold, a bit of iron nail pierced his finger and drew blood; so he sat down and, wiping away the blood, bound up his finger. Then he arose crying out, and fared forwards till he came to a Hammam and entering took off his clothes, and when he looked about him he found it clean and empty. So he sat him down by the fountain-basin, and ceased not pouring water on his head, till he was tired. —- And Sharazad perceived the dawn of day and ceased to say her permitted say.

When it was the One Hundred and Forty-third Night,
She said, It hath reached me, O auspicious King, that the man sat down by the fountain-basin and ceased not pouring water on his head till he was tired. Then he went out to the room in which was the cistern of cold water; and seeing no one there, he found a quiet corner and taking out a piece of Hashísh[1], swallowed it. Presently the fumes mounted to his brain and he rolled over on to the marble floor. Then the Hashish made him fancy that a great lord was shampooing him and that two slaves stood at his head, one bearing a bowl and the other washing gear and all the requisites of the Hammam. When he saw this, he said to himself, “Meseemeth these here be mistaken in me; or else they are of the company of us Hashish-eaters.”[2] Then he stretched out his legs and he imagined that the bathman said to him, “O my master, the time of thy going up to the Palace draweth near and it is to-day thy turn of service.” At this he laughed and said to himself, “As Allah willeth, O Hashish!” Then he sat and said nothing, whilst the bathman arose and took him by the hand and girt his middle with a waist-cloth of black silk, after which the two slaves followed him with the bowls and gear; and they ceased not escorting him till they brought him into a cabinet, wherein they set incense and perfumes a-burning. He found the place full of various kinds of fruits and sweet-scented flowers, and they sliced him a water-melon and seated him on a stool of ebony, whilst the bathman stood to wash him and the slaves poured water on him; after which they rubbed him down well and said, “O our lord, Sir Wazir, health to thee forever!” Then they went out and shut the door on him; and in the vanity of phantasy he arose and removed the waist-cloth from his middle, and laughed till he well nigh fainted. He gave not over laughing for some time and at last quoth he to himself, “What aileth them to address me as if I were a Minister and style me Master, and Sir? Haply they are now blundering; but after an hour they will know me and say, This fellow is a beggar; and will take their fill of cuffing me on the neck.” Presently, feeling hot, he opened the door, whereupon it seemed to him that a little white slave and an eunuch came in to him carrying a parcel. Then the slave opened it and brought out three kerchiefs of silk, one of which he threw over his head, a second over his shoulders, and a third he tied round his waist. Moreover, the eunuch gave him a pair of bath-clogs, and he put them on; after which in came white slaves and eunuchs and supported him (and he laughing the while) to the outer hall, which he found hung and spread with magnificent furniture, such as beseemeth none but kings; and the pages hastened up to him and seated him on the divan. Then they fell to kneading him till sleep overcame him; and he dreamt that he had a girl in his arms. So he kissed her and set her between his thighs; then, sitting to her as a man sitteth to a woman, he took yard in hand and drew her towards him and weighed down upon her and lo! he heard one saying to him, “Awake, thou ne’er-do-well! The noon-hour is come and thou art still asleep.” He opened his eyes and found himself lying on the marge of the cold-water tank, amongst a crowd of people all laughing at him; for his prickle was at point and the napkin had slipped from his middle. So he knew that all this was but a confusion of dreams and an illusion of the Hashish and he was vexed and said to him who had aroused him, “Would thou hadst waited till I had put it in!” Then said the folk, “Art thou not ashamed, O Hashish-eater, to be sleeping stark naked with stiff-standing tool?” And they cuffed him till his neck was red. Now he was starving, yet forsooth he savoured the flavour of pleasure in his dream.
1. The Pers. “Bang”; Indian “Bhang”; Maroccan “Fasúkh” and S. African “Dakhá.” (Pilgrimage i. 64.) I heard of a “Hashish-orgie” in London which ended in half the experimentalists being on their sofas for a week. The drug is useful for stokers, having the curious property of making men insensible to heat. Easterns also use it for “Imsák” prolonging coition, of which I speak presently.

2. Arab. “Hashsháshín;” whence Dr Sacy derived “assassin.” A notable effect of the Hashish preparation is wildly to excite the imagination, a kind of delirium imaginans sive phantasticum

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The Tale Of Two Hashish Eaters (Traditional)

From 1001 Arabian Nights
There was once, my lord and crown upon my head, a man in a certain city, who was a fisherman by trade and a hashish-eater by occupation. When he had earned his daily wage, he would spend a little of it on food and the rest on a sufficiency of that hilarious herb. He took his hashish three times a day: once in the morning on an empty stomach, once at noon, and once at sundown. Thus he was never lacking in extravagent gaity. Yet he worked hard enough at his fishing, though sometimes in a very extravagent fashion.
On a certain evening, for instance, when he had taken a larger dose of his favorite drug than usual, he lit a tallow candle and sat in front of it, asking himself eager questions and answering with obliging wit. After some hours of this delight, he became aware of the cool silence of the night about him and the clear light of a full moon abouve his head, and exclaimed affably to himself: “Dear friend, the silent streets and the cool of the moon invite us to a walk. Let us go forth, while all the world is in bed and none may mar our solitary exaltation.” Speaking in this way to himself, the fisherman left his house and began to walk towards the river; but, as he went, he saw the light of the full moon lying in the roadway and took it to be the water of the river. “My dear old friend the fisherman,” he said, “get your line and take the best of the fishing, while your rivals are indoors.” So he ran back and fetched his hook and line, and cast into the glittering patch of moonlight on the road.
Soon an enormous dog, tempted by the smell of the bait, swallowed the hook greedily and then, feeling the barb, made desperate efforts to get loose. The fisherman struggled for some time against this enormous fish, but at last he was pulled over and rolled into the moonlight. Even then he would not let go his line, but held on grimly, uttering frightened cries. “Help, help, good Mussulmans!” he shouted. “Help me to secure this mighty fish, for he is dragging me into the deeps! Help, help, good friends, for I am drowning!” The guards of that quarter ran up at the noise and began laughing at the fisherman’s antics; but when he yelled: “Allah curse you, O sons of bitches! Is it a time to laugh when I am drowning?” they grew angry and, after giving him a sound beating, dragged him into the presence of the kadi.
At this point Shahrazad saw the approach of morning and discreetly fell silent.
BUT WHEN THE SEVEN-HUNDRED-AND-NINETY-EIGHTH NIGHT HAD COME SHE said:
Allah had willed that the kadi should also be addicted to the use of hashish; recognizing that the prisoner was under that jocund influence, he rated the guards soundly and dismissed them. Then he handed over the fisherman to his slaves that they might give him a bed for calm sleep. After a pleasant night and a day given up to the consumption of excellent food, the fisherman was called to the kadi in the evening and received by him like a brother. His host supped with him; and then the two sat opposite the lighted candles and each swallowed enough hashish to destroy a hundred-year-old elephant. When the drug exalted their natural dispositions, they undressed completely and began to dance about, singing and committing a thousand extravagances.
Now it happened that the Sultan and his wazir were walking through the city, disguised as merchants, and heard a strange noise rising from the kadi’s house. They entered through the unlatched door and found two naked men, who stopped dancing at their entrance and welcomed them without the least embarrassment. The Sultan sat down to watch his venerable kadi dance again; but when he saw that the other man had a dark and lively zabb, so long that the eye might not carry to the end of it, he whispered in his wazir’s startled ear: “As Allah lives, our kadi is not as well hung as his guest!” “What are you whispering about?” cried the fisherman. “I am the Sultan of this city and I order you to watch my dance respectfully, otherwise I will have your head cut off. I am the Sultan, this is my wazir; I hold the whole world like a fish in the palm of my right hand.” The Sultan and his wazir realized that they were in the presence of two hashish-eaters, and the wazir, to amuse his master, addressed the fisherman, saying: “How long have you been Sultan, dear master, and can you tell me what has happened to your predecessor?” “I deposed the fellow,” answered the fisherman. “I said: ‘Go Away!’ and he went away.”
“Did he not protest?” asked the wazir.
“Not at all,” replied the fisherman. “He was delighted to be relased from the burden of kingship. He abdicated with such good grace that I keep him by me as a servant. He is an excellent dancer. When he pines for his throne, I tell him stories. Now I want to piss.” So saying, he lifted up his interminable tool and, walking over to the Sultan, seemed to be about to discharge upon him.
“I also want to piss,” exclaimed the kadi, and took up the same threatening position in front of the wazir. The two victims shouted with laughter and fled from that house, crying over their shoulders: “God’s curse on all hashish-eaters!”
Next morning, that the jest might be complete, the Sultan called the kadi and his guest before him. “O discreet pillar of our law,” he said, “I have called you to me because I wish to learn the most convenient manner of pissing. Should one squat and carefully lift the robe, as religion prescribes? Should one stand up, as is the unclean habit of unbelievers? Or should one undress completely and piss against one’s friends, as is the custom of two hashish-eaters of my acquaintance?”
Knowing that the Sultan used to walk about the city in disguise, the kadi realized in a flash the identity of his last night’s visitors, and fell on his knees, crying: “My lord, my lord, the hashish spake in these indelicacies, not I!”
But the fisherman, who by his careful daily taking of the drug was always under its effect, called somewhat sharply: “And what of it? You are in your palace this morning, we were in our palace last night.”
“O sweetest noise in all our kingdom,” answered the delighted King, “as we are both Sultans of this city, I think you had better henceforth stay with me in my palace. If you can tell stories, I trust that you will at once sweeten our hearing with a chosen one.”
“I will do so gladly, as soon as you have pardoned my wazir,” replied the fisherman; so the Sultan bade the kadi rise and sent him back forgiven to his duties.

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The Poetry Of Yahia Lababidi

Cairo
I buried your face, someplace

by the side of the new road

so I would not trip over it

every morning or on evening strolls
still, I am helplessly drawn

to the scene of this crime

for fear of forgetting

the sum of your splendor
then there’s also the rain

that loosens the soil

to reveal a bewitching feature

awash with emotion

an eye, perhaps tender or

a pale, becalmed cheek

a mouth tight with reproach or

lips pursed in a deathless smile
other times you are inscrutable

worse, is when I seem to lose you

and pick at the earth like a scab

frantic, and faithful, like a dog.

—

Clouds
to find the origin,

trace back the manifestations.

Tao
Between being and non-being

barely there

these sails of water, ice, air –
Indifferent drifters, wandering

high on freedom

of the homeless
Restlessly swithering

like ghosts, slithering through substance

in puffs and wisps
Lending an enchanting or ominous air

luminous or casting shadows,

ambivalent filters of reality
Bequeathing wreaths, or

modesty veils to great natural beauties

like mountain peaks
Sometimes simply hanging there

airborne abstract art

in open air
Suspended animation

continually contorting:

great sky whales, now, horse drawn carriages
unpinpointable thought forms,

punctuating the endless sentence of the sky.

—

What do animals dream?
Do they dream of past lives and unlived dreams

unspeakably human or unimaginably bestial?
Do they struggle to catch in their slumber

what is too slippery for the fingers of day?
Are there subtle nocturnal intimations

to illuminate their undreaming hours?
Are they haunted by specters of regret

do they visit their dead in drowsy gratitude?
Or are they revisited by their crimes

transcribed in tantalizing hieroglyphs?
Do they retrace the outline of their wounds

or dream of transformation, instead?
Do they tug at obstinate knots

inassimilable longings and thwarted strivings?
Are there agitations, upheavals or mutinies

against their perceived selves or fate?

Are they free of strengths and weaknesses peculiar

to horse, deer, bird, goat, snake, lamb or lion?
Are they ever neither animal nor human

but creature and Being?
Do they have holy moments of understanding

deep in the seat of their entity?
Do they experience their existence more fully

relieved of the burden of wakefulness?
Do they suspect, with poets, that all we see or seem

is but a dream within a dream?
Or is it merely a small dying

a little taste of nothingness that gathers in their mouths?

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Dawning
There are hours when every thing creaks

when chairs stretch their arms, tables their legs

and closets crack their backs, incautiously
Fed up with the polite fantasy

of having to stay in one place

and stick to their stations
Humans too, at work, or in love

know such aches and growing pains

when inner furnishings defiantly shift
As decisively, and imperceptibly, as a continent

some thing will stretch, croak or come undone

so that everything else must be reconsidered
One restless dawn, unable to suppress the itch

of wanderlust, with a heavy door left ajar

semi-deliberately, and a new light teasing in
Some piece of immobility will finally quit

suddenly nimble on wooden limbs

as fast as a horse, fleeing the stable.

—

Words
Words are like days:

coloring books or pickpockets,

signposts or scratching posts,

fakirs over hot coals.
Certain words must be earned

just as emotions are suffered

before they can be uttered

– clean as a kept promise.
Words as witnesses

testifying their truths

squalid or rarefied

inevitable, irrefutable.
But, words must not carry

more than they can

it’s not good for their backs

or their reputations.
For, whether they dance alone

or with an invisible partner,

every word is a cosmos

dissolving the inarticulate
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Yahia Lababidi Biography

Yahia Lababidi, born 1973, is an internationally published writer of Egyptian – Lebanese origin. Lababidi’s first book, Signposts to Elsewhere (2006) received generous reviews from writers in the USA and the Middle East.
Lababidi’s aphorisms are included in an encyclopedia of The World’s Great Aphorists (Bloomsbury) by former Time editor James Geary, out in October 2007.
Otherwise, Lababidi’s poems and essays have appeared, or are forthcoming, in journals world-wide, including: Leviathan: Melville studies (USA), Cimarron Review (USA), Mizna: journal of Arab American literature (USA), Haight Ashbury Literary Journal (USA), Islamica Magazine (USA), Philosophy Now (UK), The Wildean (UK), The Idler (UK), Other Poetry (UK), Dream Catcher (UK), Arena (Australia), Montreal Serai (Canada), Al Ahram Weekly (Egypt), Iranian Times (Iran), Bidoun: Middle East Arts and Culture magazine, as well as online literary communities such as RAWI: Radius of Arab American Writers, Inc. and The Other Voices International Project.

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Solar Fields – Dust

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The days flee so fast in the summertime… We have been working away on various projects, painting, editing, taking care of the grounds, installing this and that. We must catch our breathes, and relax a bit. The summer is our busiest times of the year for us work-wise, all a bit hard to do.
I have been thinking much on Gerrard Winstanley of late, and of William Blake. These ruminations have proved to be the basis of this entry; working it out in process I would venture. Still the themes that are running through my head at this point are just at the juncture of putting something down pen to paper. I feel a welling up of thought and emotions that has me going into another tangent in my life. Stay tuned.
This entry is dedicated to my friend Morgan Miller. He knows the reasons why.
Bright Blessings,
Gwyllm

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On The Menu:

The Caer Llwydd Poetry Shrine…

Gerard Winstanley Quotes

The Great Dictator Remix

Geoffrey Oryema – Lapowny

The Case For The Phenomena Of William Blake Experiencing Cosmic Consciousness

William Blake Poetry: A Summer’s Reading…

William Blake Biography

Geoffrey Oryema – Land of Anaka

William Blake – Art

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The Caer Llwydd Poetry Shrine…

The First Entry On Our Poetry Shrine:
The tao that can be told

is not the eternal Tao

The name that can be named

is not the eternal Name.
The unnamable is the eternally real.

Naming is the origin

of all particular things.
Free from desire, you realize the mystery.

Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.
Yet mystery and manifestations

arise from the same source.

This source is called darkness.
Darkness within darkness.

The gateway to all understanding.

—

This is of course the first part of the Tao Te Ching… I thought it appropriate for the initiation of the shrine.
I had seen a couple of similar set ups out and about in other parts of Portland. A brilliant idea, and with a little extra flair ours is unique, and hopefully the beginning of more in our neighborhood. Our friend Paul Hoagland put the shrine together on my design ideas, and he provided all of the materials. If you are interested in having one, let me know. I am installing a small altar for incense and flowers as well this week. I will update with photos, and maybe list the poems as we go.

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Gerard Winstanley Quotes:

“All men have stood for freedom… For freedom is the man that will turn the world upside down.”
“Let reason rule the man and he dares not trespass against his fellow creatures, but will do as he would be done unto, For Reason tells him is thy neighbour hungry and naked today, do thou feed and clothe him, it may be thy case tomorrow and then he will be ready to help thee.”
“Everyone that gets an authority into his hands tyrannizes over others; as many husbands, parents, masters, magistrates, that live after the flesh do carry themselves like oppressing lords over such as are under them, not knowing that their wives, children, servants, subjects are their fellow creatures, and hath an equal privilege to share them in the blessing of liberty.”
“For surely this particular property of mine and thine hath brought in all misery upon people. For first, it hath occasioned people to steal one from another. Secondly, it hath made laws to hang those that did steal. It tempts people to do an evil action and then kills them for doing it. Let all judge if this not be a great devil.”
“When this universal law of equity rises up in every man and woman, then none shall lay claim to any creature and say, This is mine, and that is yours. This is my work, that is yours. But everyone shall put their hands to till the earth and bring up cattle, and the blessing of the earth shall be common to all; when a man hath need of any corn or cattle, take from the next store-house he meets with. There shall be no buying and selling, no fairs or markets, but the whole earth shall be the common treasury for every man, for the earth is the Lord’s…

“When a man hath eat, and drink, and clothes, he hath enough. And all shall cheerfully put to their hands to make these things that are needful, one helping another. There shall be none lords over others, but everyone shall be a lord of himself, subject to the law of righteousness, reason and equity, which shall dwell and rule in him, which is the Lord.”
“When the people stare at the sky and dream of blessedness, or when they quiver with fear for hell after death, their eyes get blinded so they can’t see their own right of primogeniture.”

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The Great Dictator Remix:

I’m sorry, but I don’t want to be an Emperor – that’s not my business. I don’t want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone, if possible — Jew, gentile, black man, white. We all want to help one another; human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness, not by each other’s misery. We don’t want to hate and despise one another. In this world there’s room for everyone and the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone.
The way of life can be free and beautiful.
But we have lost the way.
Greed has poisoned men’s souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical, our cleverness hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery, we need humanity. More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost.
The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men, cries out for universal brotherhood for the unity of us all. Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world, millions of despairing men, women, and little children, victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people.
To those who can hear me I say, “Do not despair.” The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed, the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass and dictators die; and the power they took from the people will return to the people and so long as men die, liberty will never perish.
Soldiers: Don’t give yourselves to brutes, men who despise you, enslave you, who regiment your lives, tell you what to do, what to think and what to feel; who drill you, diet you, treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men, machine men, with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts. You don’t hate; only the unloved hate, the unloved and the unnatural.
Soldiers: Don’t fight for slavery! Fight for liberty! In the seventeenth chapter of Saint Luke it is written, “the kingdom of God is within man” — not one man, nor a group of men, but in all men, in you, you the people have the power, the power to create machines, the power to create happiness. You the people have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure.
Then, in the name of democracy, let us use that power! Let us all unite!! Let us fight for a new world, a decent world that will give men a chance to work, that will give you the future and old age a security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power, but they lie! They do not fulfill their promise; they never will. Dictators free themselves, but they enslave the people!! Now, let us fight to fulfill that promise!! Let us fight to free the world, to do away with national barriers, to do away with greed, with hate and intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness.
Soldiers: In the name of democracy, let us all unite!!!

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Geoffrey Oryema – Lapowny

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The Case For The Phenomena Of William Blake Experiencing Cosmic Consciousness

By – Richard Maurice Bucke
If Blake had Cosmic Consciousness the words written above as to the vastly greater scope and variety of this than of self consciousness will receive from his case illustration. The few short extracts from his writings, below quoted, almost prove that he had the Cosmic Sense, which he called “Imaginative Vision” [95: 166], and he must have attained to it within a very few years after reaching the thirtieth of his age. There do not appear to be any details extant of his entrance into it, but his writings may fairly be allowed to prove the fact of possession.
I.
W. M. Rossetti, in the “Prefatory Memoir” to “The Poetical Works of William Blake” [52], gives an admirable sketch of Blake’s actual life and apparently a fair estimate of his abilities and defects. The following extracts therefrom will materially assist us in the inquiry now before us; that is: Had Blake Cosmic Consciousness?
– The difficulty of Blake’s biographers, subsequent to 1863, the date of Mr. Gilchrist’s book, is of a different kind altogether. It is the difficulty of stating sufficiently high the extraordinary claims of Blake to admiration and reverence, without slurring over those other considerations which need to be plainly and fully set forth if we would obtain any real idea of the man as he was—of his total unlikeness to his contemporaries, of his amazing genius and noble performances in two arts, of the height by which he transcended other men, and the incapacity which he always evinced for performing at all what others accomplish easily. He could do vastly more than they, but he could seldom do the like. By some unknown process he had soared to the top of a cloud-capped Alp, while they were crouching in the valley: But to reach a middle station on the mountain was what they could readily manage step by step, while Blake found that ordinary achievement impracticable. He could not and he would not do it; the want of will, or rather the utter alienation of will, the resolve to soar (which was natural to him), and not to walk (which was unnatural and repulsive), constituted or counted instead of an actual want of power [139:9].
Rapt in a passionate yearning, he realized, even on this earth and in his mortal body, a species of Nirvâna: his whole faculty, his whole personality, the very essence of his mind and mould, attained to absorption into his ideal ultimate, into that which Dante’s profound phrase designates “il Ben dell’ intelletto” [139: 11].
– William Blake’s education was of the scantiest, being confined to reading p. 193 and writing; arithmetic may also be guessed at, but is not recorded, and very probably his capacity for acquiring or retaining that item of knowledge was far below the average [139:14].
– In the fact that Blake soared beyond, and far beyond, men of self consciousness merely, but could not see or do many things that these saw clearly and could do easily, we see a relationship between him and the great illuminati. For surely the very same thing could be said of all these. In worldly matters they are all, or nearly all, as little children, while in spiritual things they are as gods. Note Balzac contracting enormous debts for want of ordinary business common sense and laboring vainly for years to pay them while in the full exercise of enough genius to equip a regiment of Rothschilds. Bacon showered upon the human race intellectual and spiritual riches beyond all computation, but with every apparent advantage (position at court, hereditary prestige, influential friends) he labors in vain for years for position in the self conscious sphere, and after getting it cannot hold it. Buddha, Jesus, Paul, Las Casas, Yepes, Behmen and Whitman were wise: They saw that the things of the Cosmic Sense were enough, and they simply put by the things of self consciousness, but had they tried for these the chances are they would have failed to obtain them.
– Blake, too, found the world of the Cosmic Sense enough, and wisely did not waste time and energy seeking for the so-called goods and riches of the self-conscious life.
– These men are independent of education, and most of them—like Blake himself—p. 193 think it useless or worse. Blake says of it: “There is no use in education: I hold it to be wrong. It is the great sin; it is eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. This was the fault of Plato. He knew of nothing but the virtues and vices, and good and evil. There is nothing in all that. Everything is good in God’s eyes” [139: 80]. This reminds us of what Hawley said of Bacon: “He had not his knowledge from books, but from some grounds within himself” [141: 47], and of Whitman’s “You shall no longer feed on the spectres in books” [193: 30].
– In the preface to “The Jerusalem” Blake speaks of that composition as paving been “dictated” to him, and other expressions of his prove that he regarded it rather as a revelation of which he was the scribe than as the product of his own inventing and fashioning brain. Blake considered it “the grandest poem that this world contains;” adding, “I may praise it, since I dare not pretend to be any other than the secretary—the authors are in eternity.” In an earlier letter (April 25th, 1803) he had said: “I have written this poem from immediate dictation, twelve or sometimes twenty or thirty lines at a time, without premeditation, and even against my will” [139:41].
– Blake had a mental intuition, inspiration, or revelation—call it what we will; it was as real to his spiritual eye as a material object could be to his bodily eye; and no doubt his bodily eye, the eye of a designer or painter with a great gift of invention and composition, was far more than normally ready at following the dictate of the spiritual eye, and seeing, with an almost instantaneously creative and fashioning act, the visual semblance of a visionary essence [139:62].
– His unworldliness, extreme as it was, did not degenerate into ineptitude. He apprehended the requirements of practical life, was prepared to meet them in a resolute and diligent spirit from day to day, and could on occasions display a full share of sagacity. He was of lofty and independent spirit, not caring to refute any odd stories that were current regarding his conduct or demeanor, neither parading nor concealing his poverty, and seldom accepting any sort of aid for which he could not and did not supply a full equivalent [139:69].
– This is the declaration of each possessor of the Cosmic Sense. It is not I, the visible man who speaks, but (as Jesus says) “As the Father hath said unto me so I speak” [14: 12: 50]; or as Paul writes: “I will not dare to speak of any things save those which Christ wrought through me” [16: 15:18]. “Loose the stop from your throat” [193: 32] says Whitman to the Cosmic Sense. And so universally.
– “O I am sure,” says Whitman, “they really came from Thee—the urge, the ardor, the potent, felt, interior, command, a message from the heavens” [193: 324]. “The noble truths,” Gautama said, ”were not among the doctrines banded down, but there arose within him the eye to perceive them” [159: 150].
– Each word of this passage is strictly true of Whitman, and allowing for difference of manners and customs in other times and countries, the paragraph could be read into the life of any one of the men discussed in this book.
He knows that what he does is not inferior to the gran
dest antiques. Superior it cannot be, for human power cannot go beyond either what he does or what they have done. It is the gift of God, it is inspiration and vision [139:72].
It must be allowed that in many instances Blake spoke of himself with measureless and rather provoking self-applause. This is in truth one conspicuous outcome of that very simplicity of character of which I have just spoken; egotism it is, but not worldly, self-seeking [139: 71].
That he was on the whole and in the best sense happy is, considering all his trials and crosses, one of the very highest evidences in his praise. “If asked,” writes Mr. Palmer, “whether I ever knew among the intellectual a happy man, Blake would be the only one who would immediately occur to me.” Visionary and ideal aspirations of the intensest kind; the imaginative life wholly predominating over the corporeal and mundane life, and almost swallowing it up; and a child-like simplicity of personal character, free from self-interest, and ignorant or careless of any policy of self-control, though habitually guided and regulated by noble emotions and a resolute loyalty to duty—these are the main lines which we trace throughout the entire career of Blake, in his life and death, in his writings and his art. This it is which makes him so peculiarly lovable and admirable as a man, and invests his works, especially his poems, with so delightful a charm. We feel that he is truly “of the kingdom of heaven”: above the firmament, his soul holds converse with archangels; on the earth, he is as the little child whom Jesus “sat in the midst of them” [139:70].
The essence of Blake’s faculty, the power by which he achieved his work, was intuition: this holds good of his artistic productions, and still more so of his poems. Intuition reigns supreme in them; and even the reader has to apprehend them intuitively, or else to leave them aside altogether [139:74].
Ample evidence exists to satisfy us that Blake had real conceptions In the metaphysical or supersensual regions of thought—conceptions which might have been termed speculations in other people, but in him rather intuitions; and that the “Prophetic Books” embody these in some sort of way cannot be disputed [139: 120].
– “Divine am I,” says Whitman, “inside and out” [193: 49].
– “I conned old times,” says Whitman; “I sat studying at the feet of the great masters, now if eligible O that the great masters might return and study me” [193: 20].
– Happiness is one of the marks of the Cosmic Sense.
– It is too bad that these “Prophetic Books” are not published. It seems almost certain that they embody (behind thick veils, doubtless) revelations of extraordinary value—news from “the kingdom of heaven”—from the better world—the world of the Cosmic Sense.
As to his religious belief, it should be understood that Blake was a Christian in a certain way, and a truly fervent Christian; but it was a way of his own, exceedingly different from that of any of the churches. For the last forty years of his life he never entered a place of worship [139:76].
He believed—with a great profundity and ardor of faith—in God; but he believed also that men are gods, or that collective man is God. He believed in Christ; but exactly what he believed him to be is a separate question. “Jesus Christ,” he said, conversing with Mr. Robinson, “is the only God, and so am I, and so are you” [139:77].
In immortality Blake seems to have believed implicitly, and (in some main essentials) without much deviation from other people’s credence. When he heard of Flaxman’s death (December 7th, 1826), he observes, “I cannot think of death as more than the going out of one room into another.” In one of his writings he says: “The world of imagination is the world of eternity. It is the divine bosom into which we shall all go after the death of the vegetated body” [139:79].
Blake had in all probability read in his youth some of the mystical or cabalistic writers —Paracelsus, Jacob Böhme, Cornelius Agrippa; and there is a good deal in his speculations, in substance and tone, and sometimes in detail, which can be traced back to authors of this class [139: 80].
– Blake’s religion—his attitude toward the Church—toward God—toward immortality—is the characteristic attitude of the man who has attained to Cosmic Consciousness—as shown in each life and in all the writings of these men.
-His attitude toward death is that of all the illuminati. He does not believe in “another life.” He does not think he will be immortal. He has eternal life.
-So writes George Frederic Parsons about Balzac [6: 11]. Thoreau makes a similar suggestion as to Whitman [38: 143], and generally it is constantly being hinted or intimated that some of these men have been reading others of them. This may of course sometimes happen, but, speaking generally, it does not, for many of them are quite illiterate, and the studies of others, as, for instance, Bacon, do not lie in that direction. Blake, Balzac, Yepes, Behmen, Whitman, Carpenter and the rest has each seen for himself that other world of which he tells us. No one can tell of it at second hand, for no one who has not seen something of it can conceive it.
Blake’s death was as noble and characteristic as his life. Gilchrist [94: 360–1] gives us the following simple and touching account of it:
“His illness was not violent, but a gradual and gentle failure of physical powers which nowise affected the mind. The speedy end was not foreseen by his friends. It came on a Sunday, August 12, 1827, nearly three months before completion of his seventieth year. ‘On the day of his death,’ writes Smith, who had his account from the widow, ‘he composed and uttered songs to his Maker so sweetly to the ear of his Catharine that when she stood to hear him he, looking upon her most affectionately, said: “My beloved, they are not mine—no, they are not mine!” He told her they would not be parted; he should always be about her to take care of her. To the pious songs followed, about six in the summer evening, a calm and painless withdrawal of breath; the exact moment almost unperceived by his wife, who sat by his side. A humble female neighbor, her only other companion, said afterwards: “I have been at the death, not of a man, but of a blessed angel.”
II.
It remains to quote certain declarations emanating from Blake and which seem to bear upon the point under consideration—viz., upon the question, Was Blake a case of Cosmic Consciousness?
The world of imagination is the world of eternity. It is the divine bosom into which we shall all go after the death of the vegetated body. This world of imagination is infinite and eternal, whereas the world of generation, of vegetation, is finite and temporal. There exist in that eternal world the permanent realities of everything which we see reflected in this vegetable glass of nature [95: 163].
We are in a world of generation and death, and this world we must cast off if we would be artists such as Raphael, Michael Angelo and the ancient sculptors. If we do not cast off this world we shall be only Venetian painters, who will be cast off and lost from art [95:172].
The player is a liar when he says: Angels are happier than men because they are better! Angels are happier than men and devils because they are not always prying after good and evil in one another and eating the tree of knowledge for Satan’s gratification [95:176].
– Blake’s name for Cosmic Consciousness. With this paragraph compare Whitman’s “I swear I think now that everything without exception has an eternal soul! The trees have rooted in the ground! The weeds of the sea have! The animals” [193: 337].
– The world of self consciousness. Balzac says: (Self conscious) “man judge
s all things by his abstractions—good, evil, virtue, crime. His formulas of right are his scales, and his justice is blind; the justice of God [i.e., of the Cosmic Sense] sees—in that is everything” [5: 142].
– “Showing the best and dividing it from the worst age vexes age. Knowing the perfect fitness and equanimity of things, while they discuss I am silent” [193: 31].
The last judgment is an overwhelming of bad art and science [95: 176].
Some people flatter themselves that there will be no last judgment. . . .- I will not flatter them. Error is created; truth is eternal. Error or creation will be burned up, and then, and not till then, truth or eternity will appear. It [error] is burned up the moment men cease to behold it. I assert for myself that I do not behold outward creation, and that to me it is hindrance and not action. “What!” it will be questioned, “when the sun rises do you not see a round disc of fire somewhat like a guinea?” “Oh, no, no! I see an innumerable company of the heavenly host crying: ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty!’” I question not my corporeal eye* any more than I would question a window concerning a sight. I look through it and not with it [95: 176].
Beneath the figures of Adam and Eve (descending the generative stream from there) is the seat of the harlot, named mystery [self conscious life], in the Revelations. She (mystery) is seized by two beings (life and death), each with three heads; they represent vegetative existence. As it is written in Revelations, they strip her naked and burn her with fire [i.e., death strips her naked, and the passions of the self conscious life burn it as with fire]. It represents the eternal consumption of vegetable life and death [the life and death of the merely self conscious] with its lusts. The wreathed torches in their hands [in the hands of life and death] represent eternal fire, which is the fire of generation or vegetation; it is an eternal consummation. Those who are blessed with imaginative vision [Cosmic Consciousness]* see this eternal female [mystery—the self conscious life] and tremble at what others fear not; while they despise and laugh at what others fear [95:166].
-I am not ashamed, afraid or averse to tell you what ought to be told—that I am under the direction of messengers from heaven, daily and nightly. But the nature of such things is not, as some suppose, without trouble or care [95: 185].
– I.e., it is the advent of universal Cosmic Consciousness. “Specialism [the Cosmic Sense] opens to man,” says Balzac, “his true career; the infinite dawns upon him” [5: 144]. “The audit of nature, though delayed, must be answered, and her quietus is to render thee” [Cosmic Consciousness] [176: 126].
– Blake says his self conscious faculties are a hindrance to him, not a help. So Balzac: “Baneful, it [self consciousness] exempts man from entering the path of specialism [Cosmic Consciousness], which leads to the infinite” [5: 142]. So the Hindoo experts teach and have always taught, that suppression and effacement of many of the self conscious faculties are necessary conditions to illumination [56: 166 et seq.].
– So Carpenter asks (knowing well the answer): ”Does there not exist in truth . . an inner illumination . . . by which we can ultimately see things as they are, beholding all creation . . . in its true being and order [57:98].
– “Their worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched” [12: 9: 48], said by Jesus of the self conscious life, which (also) is the hell of Dante.
– So Whitman: “I laugh at what you call dissolution.”
– “He [my other self], nor that affable, familiar ghost [the Cosmic Sense] which nightly gulls him with intelligence” [176: 86].
“A message from the Heavens whispering to me even in sleep” [193: 324].
III.

SUMMARY.
a. Blake seems to have entered into Cosmic Consciousness when a little more than thirty years of age.
b. The present editor does not know anything of the occurrence of subjective light in his case.
c. The fact of great intellectual illumination seems clear.
d. His moral elevation was very marked.
e. He seems to have had the sense of immortality that belongs to Cosmic Consciousness.
f. Specific details of proof are in this case, as they must inevitably often be, largely wanting, but a study of Blake’s life, writings (he is not in a position nor is he competent to judge Blake from his drawings) and death convinces the writer that he was a genuine and even probably a great case.

____________

William Blake Poetry: A Summer’s Reading…

Love’s Secret

Never seek to tell thy love,

Love that never told can be,

For the gentle wind doth move

Silently, invisibly.

I told my love, I told my love,

I told her all my heart,

Trembling, cold, in ghastly fears.

Ah! she did depart!

Soon after she was gone from me,

A traveller came by,

Silently, invisibly,

He took her with a sigh.

—
To The Evening Star
Thou fair-hair’d angel of the evening,

Now, whilst the sun rests on the mountains, light

Thy bright torch of love; thy radiant crown

Put on, and smile upon our evening bed!

Smile on our loves, and while thou drawest the

Blue curtains of the sky, scatter thy silver dew

On every flower that shuts its sweet eyes

In timely sleep. Let thy west wind sleep on

The lake; speak silence with thy glimmering eyes,

And wash the dusk with silver. Soon, full soon,

Dost thou withdraw; then the wolf rages wide,

And then the lion glares through the dun forest:

The fleeces of our flocks are cover’d with

Thy sacred dew: protect them with thine influence!

—
The Garden of Love

I laid me down upon a bank,

Where Love lay sleeping;

I heard among the rushes dank

Weeping, weeping.

Then I went to the heath and the wild,

To the thistles and thorns of the waste;

And they told me how they were beguiled,

Driven out, and compelled to the chaste.

I went to the Garden of Love,

And saw what I never had seen;

A Chapel was built in the midst,

Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this Chapel were shut

And “Thou shalt not,” writ over the door;

So I turned to the Garden of Love

That so many sweet flowers bore.

And I saw it was filled with graves,

And tombstones where flowers should be;

And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,

And binding with briars my joys and desires.

—
The Voice of the Ancient Bard

Youth of delight! come hither

And see the opening morn,

Image of Truth new-born.

Doubt is fled, and clouds of reason,

Dark disputes and artful teazing.

Folly is an endless maze;

Tangled roots perplex her ways;

How many have fallen there!

They stumble all night over bones of the dead;

And feel — they know not what but care;

And wish to lead others, when they should be led.

—
To Summer
O thou who passest thro’ our valleys in

Thy strength, curb thy fierce steeds, allay the heat

That flames from their large nostrils! thou, O Summer,

Oft pitched’st here thy goldent tent, and oft

Beneath our oaks hast slept, while we beheld

With joy thy ruddy limbs and flourishing hair.

Beneath our thickest shades we oft have heard

Thy voice, when noon upon his fervid car

Rode o’er the deep of heaven; beside our springs

Sit down, and in our mossy valleys, on

Some bank beside a river clear, throw thy

Silk draperies off, and rush into the stream:

Our valleys love the Summer in his pride.

Our bards are fam’d who strike the silver wire:

Our youth are bolder than the southern swains:

Our maidens fairer in the sprightly dance:

We lack not songs, nor instruments of joy,

Nor echoes sweet, nor waters clear as heaven,

Nor laurel wreaths against the sultry heat.

___________

William Blake – Biography

“To see a World in a grain of sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,

Hold Infinity in the Palm of your hand

And Eternity in an Hour.”

from Auguries of Innocence
William Blake was born on November 28, 1757 in London, the third of five children. His father James was a hosier, and could only afford to give William enough schooling to learn the basics of reading and writing, though for a short time he was able to attend a drawing school run by Henry Par.
William worked in his father’s shop until his talent for drawing became so obvious that he was apprenticed to engraver James Basire at age 14. He finished his apprenticeship at age 21, and set out to make his living as an engraver.
Blake married Catherine Boucher at age 25, and she worked with him on most of his artistic creations. Together they published a book of Blake’s poems and drawings called Songs of Innocence.
Blake engraved the words and pictures on copper plates (a method he claimed he received in a dream), and Catherine coloured the plates and bound the books. Songs of Innocence sold slowly during Blake’s lifetime, indeed Blake struggled close to poverty for much of his life.
More successful was a series of copperplate engravings Blake did to illustrate the Book of Job for a new edition of the Old Testament.
Blake did not have a head for business, and he turned down publisher’s requests to focus on his own subjects. In his choice of subject Blake was often guided by his gentle, mystical views of Christianity. Songs of Experience (1794) was followed by Milton (1804-1808), and Jerusalem (1804-1820).
In 1800 Blake gained a patron in William Hayley, who commissioned him to illustrate his Life of Cowper, and to create busts of famous poets for his house in Felpham, Suurey.
While at Felpham, Blake was involved in a bizarre episode which could have proven disastrous; he was accused by a drunken soldier of cursing the king, and on this testimony he was brought to trial for treason. The case against Blake proved flimsy, and he was cleared of the charges.
Blake poured his whole being into his work. The lack of public recognition sent him into a severe depression which lasted from 1810-1817, and even his close friends thought him insane.
Unlike painters like Gainsborough, Blake worked on a small scale; most of his engravings are little more than inches in height, yet the detailed rendering is superb and exact. Blake’s work received far more public acclaim after his death, and an excerpt from his poem Milton was set to music, becoming a sort of unofficial Christian anthem of English nationalism in the 20th century.
William Blake died on August 12, 1827, and is buried in an unmarked grave at Bunhill Fields, London.

___________
Geoffrey Oryema – Land of Anaka

___________

It has always seemed strange to me…The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second. – John Steinbeck, Cannery Row

The Master keeps her mind

always at one with the Tao;

that is what gives her her radiance.
The Tao is ungraspable.

How can her mind be at one with it?

Because she doesn’t cling to ideas.
The Tao is dark and unfathomable.

How can it make her radiant?

Because she lets it.
Since before time and space were,

the Tao is.

It is beyond is and is not.

How do I know this is true?

I look inside myself and see.

July, 2009: Small Victories…

So… It is now allowed to paint murals in Portland Oregon, but with a few Caveats: “So, we all should all take pride in working to resolve what was a very difficult and intractable process. And we succeeded to the extent that it was possible at this time. If I had my way we would be free to create murals without restriction but it seems that those days are gone for now. We can however create murals. The application process may be an expensive bureaucratic maze and the restrictions are aggravating but we can now create artwork on the walls of a city where two days ago murals were practically illegal.” – Joe Cotter
Thanks to Joe Cotter, and Joanne Oleksiak who in Joes words: “I want to thank Joanne Oleksiak, who, through Portland Mural Defense, did the bulk of the outreach organizing and spent the last several years facilitating events and bringing in people from around the country and beyond. It was those efforts that led to the widespread support we received in our struggle to free murals from the sign code.”
It is a privilege knowing both Joanne and Joe. They didn’t waver, hesitate or back down. It is a giant step, and one we can savor at this this point. They stuck in there, and my hat is off to the two of them.
The truth of the matter is my mural will be “allowed to be uncovered” after fees, approvals etc. Mirador will not face censure, fines etc., if the niceties are followed. Still, I feel that this whole issue will eventually return to court as a 1st Amendment issue. So much restriction and binding of expression surely cannot be proper. The court case of Clear Channel versus The City of Portland still has not been settled. The Corporate assault on The Commons remains and is a threat to many aspects of life and governance in the US, and indeed across the globe. When art has to go through “approved channels”, read “Censors” I have to throw in a quote that I feel fits at this point (kinda/sorta):
“In a word, we reject all legislation, all authority, and all privileged, licensed, official, and legal influence, even though arising from universal suffrage, convinced that it can turn only to the advantage of a dominant minority of exploiters against the interests of the immense majority in subjection to them.” –Mikhail Bakunin, God and the State
The corporate assault is but part of this: the fact that art is being regulated by bureaucrats, even the best of, and the kindest of, is still regulation in the end. We are on a slippery slope and I think we might agree that this present situation is indeed an improvement on the previous state of no murals allowed, but in the end the current regulations must be subverted and overthrown – removed from the bureaucrats hands. We should not accept limitation/regulation in the expression of the arts just as we should be resisting the current trend to limit free speech. “Free Speech Zones” are as abhorrent as “Approved Murals” in my POV. Enough already. Open up the walls of Portland and every city to freedom of expression and speech.

—

The Great Wheel Turns:
We had a wonderful 4th; with lot of friends up at John Gunn’s. Always a great crowd of people. We were able to touch bases with the Brigg’s who are off to Boise soon. We will miss them very, very much.
Currently we are finishing up an exterior of a house. Struggling a bit with the heat and all, but really we are almost there. Great people to work with. This may be the last of this type of work for us. Some serious re-invention is percolating through our consciousness… 80)
Rowan started working on “The Blue Pill” (as an apprentice/assistant to the director of photography) this past week. The film is now in full production and we shall hardly see him for the next month or so. He is fledgling quickly. He has learned more in the last couple of weeks working with the crew than the last several years as he has said. I am hoping he stays in art school until he gets his degree, but the universe may have other plans.
This entry took a while, and I would like to thank Jessica Deva for reminding me how great Underworld are as a band. This entry has some of my favourite artist and poetry. I hope you will enjoy it.
Praying that all is well with you, and that you are with those you love…
Bright Blessings,
Gwyllm
On The Menu:

Novalis Quotes

The Links

Underworld – dark and long (dark train)

Lives Of The Greek Heroines – Niobe

English Poet: Phillip Larkin

Underworld – Oich Oich

Art:Jens Ferdinand Willumsen

__________

__________
Novalis Quotes:

“Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.”

“To become properly acquainted with a truth, we must first have disbelieved it, and disputed against it.”

“I often feel, and ever more deeply I realize, that fate and character are the same conception.”

“The artist belongs to his work, not the work to the artist.”

“Learning is pleasurable but doing is the height of enjoyment.”

“To what extent can one have a sense for something if he doesn’t have its embryo inside him? Whatever I come to understand must itself develop organically in myself, and what I seem to learn is only nourishment and cultivation of that inner organism.”

_________
The Links:

Whales Might Be as Much Like People as….

Ruins Of The Second Gilded Age…

British Army Not To Sharp On Seed Identification…

Cockroaches Get Fat On Junk Food…

________
Underworld – dark and long (dark train)

_________

Lives Of The Greek Heroines – Niobe

To the boy Amphion, dwelling among the shepherds with his brother Zethus, through the crafty cruelty of their stepmother Dircé, came the gracious Hermes with a lyre like that which he gave to Phœbus, his brother, to console him when banished from Olympus; and so well did Amphion study the art which the god taught him, that he drew from the lyre sounds so sweet and so stirring that the rugged tempers of the country folk were softened and a longing after a higher life than that they had hitherto known was awakened in them; so that, little by little, he taught them to look to the common good of all as the first object of desire, to work together for mutual help and comfort, instead of seeking each man only his own profit: and because he showed them how to build out of trees and stones, houses, temples and strong defensive walls, men have said that at his singing trees and stones followed him.
And now Thebes, his fair city, had risen, and the thriving industry of his people had made it famous and populous, but there was still something wanting to make the happiness of the minstrel-king complete, Zethus, his brother, cared not for life in a town; the open plains and the rush of the foaming wild boar were more to his taste, with no dome above his head but the vault of heaven, and no walls but the blue hills; and in the spacious, many-chambered palace which rose in the wide market-place, there dwelt indeed the honoured Antiope, restored to her royal palace by the virtue of her sons, but no other lady, only hand maidens and attendants. Where could Amphion seek the queen who should be worthy to dwell with him in his palace, to order all things duly, to direct the labours of the women, and fill the cedar chests with beautiful garments fit for the necks of kings–where could he find a woman whom he would gladly have sitting at his hearth, who would offer sacrifice for him when affairs of state drew him from his home, who would give him children to adorn his manhood and to protect his age–where could he find her who should be worthy of the love of the king and of the poet?
In many princely houses throughout the Achæan land lovely maidens were growing up, but bard and traveller alike joined to praise Niobe, the daughter of Tantalus and of Taÿgete, the Pleiad, the granddaughter of highest Jove: and so often did Amphion hear of her beauty and her endowments that his mind became full of the thought of her; and persuading Zethus, his brother, to forego his country life and dwell within the city while he should be away, he set out with his lyre to pleasant Phrygia, where, by the pebbly Hermus, rose the royal house of Tantalus on its lofty marble pillars. Amphion did not approach the palace in a chariot or with a royal retinue; he preferred to come in the dress of a shepherd, thinking that in this lowly guise he would best learn the nature of the princess he had come to seek. He was too wise to ask her in marriage until his own eyes had justified the report of men. So he hired himself as a helper to the king’s herdsman, and was gladly accepted for the great knowledge that he had of cattle. Thus he dwelt for a time in the pastures at the foot of Mount Sipylus, where the princess often came with her maidens to gather garlands for the temples or to play at ball, and there Amphion saw her, beautiful and strong, with that divine light about her which might be looked for in a maiden in whose veins a strain of ichor, the vital fluid of the Olympians, mingled with royal human blood. He had not seen her many times when his mind was quite made up, and preluding sweetly on his lyre, so sweetly that Niobe and her maidens stopped to listen, he sung
“Daughter of Tantalus,

Over the sea,

Ploughing its wet paths,

Come I to thee,

Fairest of fair maids,

Wisest of wise,

Here on the minstrel

Turn thy sweet eyes!
“I am Amphion,

Jove is my sire;

Hast thou not heard of me–

Heard of my lyre?

How the trees follow’d, each

Bowing his head,

And how the ancient hills

Came where I led,
“Till a fair city

Stood on the plain:

Turret and battlement,

Palace and fane,

Fashion’d by line and rule,

Beams fitting close,

Pillars of marble

In beauty arose!
“Now, alas! Eros,

With bitter sweet shaft

Piercing my liver,

Deadens my craft.

Deeds of the hero

I care not to sing;

Another must look to

The works of the king.
“Come with me, Niobe,

Come in thy truth,

Be to Amphion

The wife of his youth;

“Ruling his household,

Honour’d and wise;

Come with thy beauty

To gladden his eyes!”
Now, when Tantalus, the king, knew that it was Amphion of Thebes, of whom all men talked, that was dwelling in the lowly guise of a shepherd in his pastures, and that it was for love of Niobe that he had left his royal state, he was mightily pleased; and, a hero himself; he delighted to behold the man who, though he could tame the passions of men and lead nature herself at his will, yet had not shrunk from avenging terribly on the treacherous Dircé the wrongs of the unhappy Antiope, his mother, and he gladly welcomed him, and made no secret of his great joy at Ending in him a son-in-law. So Amphion went home again that he might come and fetch his bride in state, which he shortly did, sailing over the blue Ægean in a swift galley with shining sails, Zethus, the strong hunter, his brother, and many gallant kinsmen bearing him company: and never on summer seas sailed a more jocund crew than that which rowed back the swan-like galley to Aulis, when Niobe the queen sat with her women in the stern, while Amphion’s lyre held the Tritons and the sea-nymphs, and the very monsters of the deep, in rapt delight.
Happily sped the years; the fair Boeotian land was like a thriving garden; corn lands and pastures lay in rich beauty about the queenly city, and Amphion and Niobe exulted in their fair domain, in their people, but, above all, in the sons and daughters who were the crowning glory of their lives. So strong and handsome the sons, so fair and skilful the daughters! Who has not heard of them? So many that the mother in her pride boasted that she could count by their names the months of the year. Alas! alas! that some timely sorrow had chastened her pride, and brought to her remembrance in time the vanity of all things human. In vain the wise daughter of Teiresias, Manto the prophetess, uttered her warnings; forebodings of evil darkened her soul with shadows of coming woe. Day by day she urged upon the queen to offer timely sacrifice to Latona, the great Titaness, who, having endured untold woe in her wanderings before the birth of the twin deities Phoebus-Apollo and Artemis, was now with them exalted to the highest place of honour and of glory among the Olympians. Day and night did the streets of the city ring with her warning cry:–
“Daughters of Ismenus, gather

Frequent to Latona’s shrine,

Honour pay her and her children,

Bringing frankincense and wine;

Bind your wavy locks with laurel,

Don your festive garb to-day;

By my mouth the godheads call you,

Hearken to them and obey!
But the queen set her face as flint against the new deity; she would worship none but Hera, the Goddess of Marriage and of Motherhood, and when at length the voice of the prophetess had stirred the women, and high and low gathered with her to the shrine where, by the order of Amphion, the statue of Latona was placed between those of her twin children, unhappy wrath took possession of the soul of Niobe, and gathering her royal robes about her, she swept through the streets, and breaking through the throng of worshippers, exclaimed–
“How is this, ye foolish women? What new divinity have ye set up? Are ye so hard bestead for aught to worship that ye must needs set up the image of an outcast–the offspring of the Titans, the very scourge of heaven and earth? What though she chanced to catch the wandering eye of Jove, think ye he cared much for her when he left her in her trouble to the chance charity of the smallest of the islands? 1 The daughter of Teiresias is in her dotage: the king might have known that no good would come of strange religions. Nay, if ye wanted something to worship, have ye not dwelling among you the offspring of gods and heroes-is not Amphion, your king, the very son of Jove, endowed above the race of men with the divine power of song, which raised for you this fair city, and keeps you in concord, and fear-less of foreign foes within the girth of your mighty seven-gated walls? Was it a man of mortal birth who made such music, think ye? But do ye honour this Latona because of her one son and her one daughter–those same twins of whom we hear so much? A mother of two children! If that be a claim to worship, what say ye to my seven sons and seven daughters, born and bred among yourselves, and in whom the rare blessings wherewith the Moirae 2 have honoured me have reached their crowning point? Behold how lovely and how many they are! Even should one or two fail me, I can scarce be brought down to Latona’s scant two. For very shame, then, leave this miserable shrine to the prophetess and the priests, and lay aside those laurel wreaths!
The women, bewildered and dismayed at the fierce words of the queen, mechanically took the garlands from their hair, and shrunk, cowed and silent, from the shrine, trembling alike at the anger of the queen and at the wrath of Latona. They wist not that the beautiful large stork which sat brooding above the pediment of the shrine was veritably the goddess Latona herself; come thither to do honour to her suppliants; and when she heard the furious speech of the queen, and beheld the worshippers slink away to their homes, lo! the bird rose, and stretching out her long neck to its utmost length, flapped her great wings, and flew with a sharp, whizzing sound away towards the blue Ægean and the shining Cyklades.
The day was waning, and a fresh breeze brought dreamy music from the reedy banks of the Asopus, and sweet refreshment to men and beasts, when the sons of Amphion came forth from the palace, many a noble youth bearing them company, to exercise themselves in the broad plain that lay between the city and the river. Bright and glossy were their curls, bound with a golden circlet or with bright fillets of wool; the light of youth was in their eyes; lips and cheeks glowed with health, and the limbs that the light robes of Tyrian purple left to view were round and supple–right royal youths, from Ismenius, whose brow already bore the stamp of thought, to Ilioneus, who was scarcely yet past childhood.
Ismenius and Sipylus came driving their chariots, and had engaged in a friendly contest of skill and swiftness, when now in mid-career Ismenius smote his hand upon his side and fell lifeless from his chariot; a sound as of a twanging bow-string rang through the air, and Sipylus, his brother, even as he pulled in his horses in dismay, lay stretched beside him on the plain. A cry of horror and dismay, which rose from all who were observing the princes and who saw them fall, startled Phaedimus and Tantalus, the next in age, who were wrestling breast to breast and knee to knee. They looked round in amazement, and even as they looked, before they could unlock their embrace, they fell together on the plain, smitten by one shaft. Alphenor, their brother, beholding this piteous sight, hurried to render them assistance, but even as he stooped to raise the beloved heads the sharp death overtook him, and he lay himself motionless beside those whom he was striving to succour. Of Niobe’s boasted seven sons there now remained but Damasicthon and Ilioneus, the two youngest–the youngest and best-beloved of their mother. Must these also perish to atone for the pride of the unhappy queen? Will the virtue and the piety of Amphion–a minstrel like thyself, O Phoebus!–avail nothing?
The Delian god paused, the arrow still upon the string, and turned the eyes to which all things are visible to the palace where Niobe, surrounded by her daughters, was just hearing the tidings of the death of her elder sons. O! why was not her heart humbled, why did she not cry for mercy to the offended godheads? Two sons are yet unharmed, and the fatal arrow is still in the hand of the Far-darter; with two sons and all her daughters, Niobe might still have cause for thanksgiving, if not for pride. But alas! the queen was wrathful, not humble, and received the tidings with defiant disbelief. The rising pity fled from the heart of Phoebus; wrath and indignation nerved his hand; the fatal arrow whizzed through the air, and the sons of Niobe were no more.
When the terrible tidings of the swift destruction of his sons came to Amphion, his spirit swooned within him.
“Wilt thou not come and behold them?” cried the messenger. “The arrow is invisible, indeed, but the wound can easily be seen in side, or breast, or heart. Wilt thou not look once more upon the faces of thy sons?”
“Do ye what is right,” cried the poet-king, his white head bowed upon his hands. “I also in my youth wrought a stern deed of vengeance for my mother, but not so stern as this–nay, not so stern as this. I cannot look upon the faces of the young men!” Then he arose and went out of the palace to a grove of myrtle and poplar, where he had often gathered his sons about him to hearken to the tales of heroes and kings, and in that deep shade the thought of his sorrow came so darkly over him that he lost all courage, and, opening the fountains of his life, sought again the boys, who had been the crown and joy of his manhood, in the Elysian fields where those whose life on earth has been darkened by undeserved misery spend sunless but happy ages in groves of changeless beauty.
Niobe, meanwhile, her haughty soul wrung by repeated woes, had stripped off her royal robes, and with long hair dishevelled, tearless eyes, and pallid cheeks, stood with her mourning daughters beside the funeral piles of sire and sons. In that evil hour the very greatness of her sorrow seemed to feed her pride. Husband and sons–and such a husband, and such sons!–the cruel Titaness had slain them all. What grief could equal her grief? And as she kissed each cold brow and gazed her last on the beautiful, still faces, the daughter of Tantalus hardened her heart and did not recognize her sin.
Artemis, the daughter of Latona, had stood beside her brother while he drew his deadly shafts; she stood beside him now watching the kindling piles, and, above all, the angry scowl of the bereaved queen.
“Impious daughter of an impious sire,” she exclaimed in wrathful indignation, “hath not thy sin yet come home to thee?” And swift as thought, she drew her silver bow from its case, strung it, and arrow after arrow sped from the string with a sharp twang that rung from heaven to earth, appalling the nations, until of the seven sisters there remained but one, and she the youngest. The queen in terror clasped her to her breast, striving to cover her with garments, arms, and body; and lifting her eyes t
o heaven, she groaned,–”Spare, ye irresistible, spare this the last, the least!”
Not in vain was this late prayer. Artemis heard and spared; and of the fourteen strong and beautiful children in whom their mother had exulted, there remained to her this little one; but the sights and sounds of those cruel days frighted the blood for ever from her cheeks, and she who had been ruddy as the rose and gay as the lark at morning, grew into a sad, wan woman, whom men called Chloris, and whose thoughts were ever with the dead.
Of the crushed and broken-hearted Niobe what tongue can tell? The fountains of her tears once unsealed in the supreme agony in which she wrestled for the life of Chloris refused to be closed again. Speechless and motionless she sat among the dead, weeping endless floods of tears, speaking nothing, hearing nothing.
For three days the people of Thebes were silent and motionless, struck to stone, as it were, by their calamity;but on the fourth day they gathered heart to go to the queen, to bear away the dead from her sight and to hide them in the earth.
But neither the weeping and shouting of the people nor the removal of the dead from about her, nor the clinging caresses of her little daughter, drew word or sign from Niobe. With streaming eyes lifted to heaven she wept night and day, until Hera, in compassion, wrought with Jove so that he snatched her away in a whirlwind, carried her to her own land, to Sipylus, the mountain at whose feet she had played in the happy days of her girlhood, and there turned her into stone. There, even to this day, the traveller can discern in the grey stone on the mountain side the figure of a woman weeping in eternal despair.

_________

English Poet: Phillip Larkin

The Spirit Wooed
Once I believed in you,

And then you came,

Unquestionably new, as fame

Had said you were. But that was long ago.
You launched no argument,

Yet I obeyed,

Straightaway, the instrument you played

Distant Down sidestreets, keeping different time,
And never questioned what

You fascinate

In me; if good or not, the state

You pressed towards. There was no need to know.
Grave pristine absolutes

Walked in my mind:

So that I was not mute, or blind,

As years before or since. My only crime
Was holding you too dear.

Was that the cause

You daily came less near—a pause

Longer than life, if you decide it so?
—

The Little Lives Of Earth And Form
The little lives of earth and form,

Of finding food, and keeping warm,

Are not like ours, and yet

A kinship lingers nonetheless:

We hanker for the homeliness

Of den, and hole, and set.
And this identity we feel

– Perhaps not right, perhaps not real –

Will link us constantly;

I see the rock, the clay, the chalk,

The flattened grass, the swaying stalk,

And it is you I see.

—-
An Arundel Tomb

Side by side, their faces blurred,

The earl and countess lie in stone,

Their proper habits vaguely shown

As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,

And that faint hint of the absurd –

The little dogs under their feet.
Such plainness of the pre-baroque

Hardly involves the eye, until

It meets his left-hand gauntlet, still

Clasped empty in the other; and

One sees, with a sharp tender shock,

His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.
They would not think to lie so long.

Such faithfulness in effigy

Was just a detail friends would see:

A sculptor’s sweet commissioned grace

Thrown off in helping to prolong

The Latin names around the base.
They would not guess how early in

Their supine stationary voyage

The air would change to soundless damage,

Turn the old tenantry away;

How soon succeeding eyes begin

To look, not read. Rigidly, they
Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths

Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light

Each summer thronged the glass. A bright

Litter of birdcalls strewed the same

Bone-riddled ground. And up the paths

The endless altered people came,
Washing at their identity.

Now, helpless in the hollow of

An unarmorial age, a trough

Of smoke in slow suspended skeins

Above their scrap of history,

Only an attitude remains:
Time has transfigured them into

Untruth. The stone fidelity

They hardly meant has come to be

Their final blazon, and to prove

Our almost-instinct almost true:

What will survive of us is love.

—
The Trees
The trees are coming into leaf

Like something almost being said;

The recent buds relax and spread,

Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it they are born again

And we grow old? No, they die too.

Their yearly trick of looking new

Is written down in rings of grain.
Yet still the unresting castles thresh

In fullgrown thickness every May.

Last year is dead, they seem to say,

Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

________

Underworld – Oich Oich

________

He who binds to himself a joy

Does the winged life destroy;

But he who kisses the joy as it flies

Lives in Eternity’s sunrise.

~ William Blake

“As I have not worried to be born, I do not worry to die.”

– Federico Garcia Lorca

From The Tao Te Ching:
“Those who know don’t talk.

Those who talk don’t know.
Close your mouth,

block off your senses,

blunt your sharpness,

untie your knots,

soften your glare,

settle your dust.

This is the primal identity.
Be like the Tao.

It can’t be approached or withdrawn from,

benefited or harmed,

honored or brought into disgrace.

It gives itself up continually.

That is why it endures.”

_______
Listening to Rena Jones new album Indra’s Web lately. It is her best, and that is saying alot. Support the artist, and hunt it down. I recommend it, and it will be reviewed in the new edition of The Invisible College soon-ish.

—

Progenitors: Homage To Max Ernst

Collage is the noble conquest of the irrational, the coupling of two realities, irreconcilable in appearance, upon a plane which apparently does not suit them.

-Max Ernst
Artist are often pigeon-holed into one school of expression or another. Some going voluntarily, others kicking and screaming. Some bridge schools, and the ones that steal the most successfully, begin schools. (or so it is said…)
Sometimes, it is just a matter of realizing and saluting who your influences are. I have found that I have several, but one in particular stands out with the recent work that I have been working on: Max Ernst. A giant, and I only discovered him because of my first great art crush: Sätty. Sätty borrowed from Ernst, and I have borrowed inspiration from Sätty. There, I said it. Nothing original except in application of my awareness to the art form. Of course, I no longer use the tried and true methods that both Sätty & Ernst used. The computer is my medium, and one that I love. A blessing on Photoshop!
In a conversation I had with the friend of Sätty and the conservator of Satty’s estate Walter Medeiros, Walter said that he could not see a direct connection between my work and Sätty’s. I guess that I have been moving the collage formula into another direction, but my inspiration still lies with the classic works. Other artist have mentioned that they can see the connection. Funnily enough, they mention Ernst more often than not. I take that as a compliment btw.
You can readily see the influence that Ernst had on Sätty. One of the great criticisms of Satty was that his work appeared to be derivative of Ernst, which may or may not be true, but as time went along, you could see a divergence in application with Sätty’s collages. His last works were breath-taking.
Ernst was an original. His illustrated novels, paintings and other works stand out in the Surrealist Pantheon. His works with collage may indeed have been the biggest contribution to modern art through the Surrealist stream. Through Sätty, Max Ernst stepped forward and whispered into my ear. We all have influences, and we should recognize them, and celebrate them.

—-
I started this entry around the Mimi & Richard Farina clips from Pete Seegers’ show in the mid-60′s. I admit, as a young man Mimi was better than sliced bread with jam on it. The fact that she could sing and play guitar well just added spice to it all. The reality of that I never had met her, and she was older, as well married to a brilliant partner didn’t complicate matters so much in my young mind. (There is a brilliant antiwar poster of her and her lovely sister as well as a friend from 67′: “Girls Say Yes To boys who say no”.)
Her husband Richard Farina was quite the Bohemian package. It has been said that between him, Bob Dylan, and the Baez sisters Mimi and Joan, they redefined beat into its 60′s manifestation. I can’t disagree with that, and I understand there is a book on it: “Positively 4th Street”. I am looking for a copy out of curiosity. I suggest Richard Farina’s book as well: “Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me”… this is a brilliant novelization of his early days.
I think you will find the music that Richard & Mimi made very interesting. It illuminated my days and nights when I was in my first youth, and I still find it beautiful today. Mimi died a few years back in her mid 50′s. After Richards death she still performed for awhile, but her crowning success is “Bread & Roses”… I find her work with prisoners to be a great inspiration. She lived a full life, and touched many including a young kid years ago.
This Entries Literary Theme: Turkish… through a folktale, and revisiting with Nazim Hikmet, we re-enter the stream of Turkish art. More to come, I keep discovering greater, and greater depths. This is such a great delight! If I could only devote more time to it!
Well, I have been working on this entry long enough, work is calling and the day is beautiful.
Bright Blessings,

Gwyllm
_________________
On The Menu:

The Links

Mimi & Richard Farina performing “Dopico” and “Celebration For A Grey Day”

Max Ernst Quotes

Turkish Fairy Tales: Sister and Brother

Richard & Mimi Farina – “Bold Marauder”

The Poetry of Nazim Hikmet

Mimi & Richard Farina performing “Pack Up Your Sorrows” and a small chat with Mimi

Art: Max Ernst

Bio: Max Ernst

______________________

The Links:

The Mayor of 7th Avenue…..

Glass Frog?

The Plant That Pretends To Be Ill

Solstice At Stonehenge…

Talking To The Plants..

_________________________
Mimi & Richard Farina performing “Dopico” and “Celebration For A Grey Day”

_____________________
Max Ernst Quotes:

“Painting is not for me either decorative amusement, or the plastic invention of felt reality; it must be every time: invention, discovery, revelation.”

“You can drink the images with your eyes.”

“When the artist finds himself he is lost. The fact that he has succeeded in never finding himself is regarded by Max Ernst as his only lasting achievement. “

“All good ideas arrive by chance.”

“Woman’s nudity is wiser than the philosopher’s teachings.”

_____________________

_____________________

Turkish Fairy Tales: Sister and Brother
There once lived a man named Ahmed Aga. He was very rich, and beside his wife had no one belonging to him. The only thing that disturbed his happiness was the fact that he had no child. “Allah,” said he, “has endowed me with much property and wealth; I have also an honourable name; would that He might vouchsafe me a child! Then were my happiness complete. After my death he would inherit my whole fortune, and my fame would be enhanced.”
One night he was brooding as usual over this matter and said to his wife: “Would it not have been better if Allah had given us poverty with a child?” These words pained his wife very deeply, and before she went to bed she prayed to Allah for consolation, In the night she dreamt that she was sitting by the sea-shore. A mermaid came to the surface of the water with a pot in her hand and said to the woman “Tell your husband Allah has given him this kismet; let him come and fetch it.” She hastened home to tell her husband and in her excitement woke Ahmed Aga as well as herself. “What is the matter?” asked the man. “Nothing,” answered the woman; “but you have waked me.”
“No,” returned the man, “it was you who roused me.” Then his wife recounted what she had seen and heard in her dream. “Then that was why you woke me,” muttered her husband, and turning over went to sleep again. To his wife, however, the dream was a thing of good omen.
Rising next morning, the woman advised her husband to go down to the seashore. “It might be no vain dream after all,” she mused. “Do not be foolish,” retorted her husband, “our kismet is not in dreams; if Allah has any gift to bestow on us He will do it by other means.” His wife, how. ever, gave him no peace. “Nevertheless go,” she insisted; “the sea will not engulf you, and maybe Allah will bless us in this wise.” The man could not further withstand his wife, so when he went out for a stroll, he took the direction of the seashore.
While pacing up and down he noticed that some dark object was being washed ashore on the crest of the billows. As it came nearer he could see that it was a pot, the mouth of which was securely bound. Alternating betwixt hope and fear, he seized the pot and with a bismillah opened it. Imagine his joy to find therein two newborn babes. When Ahmed Aga saw them he was like a child himself; in his delight he knew not what to do first. Taking off his cloak, he wrapped the babes carefully in it and ran all the way home. He arrived out of breath, and dropped the bundle in his wife’s lap. When she opened it and saw what it contained she too was frantic with joy, kissing the children and pressing them to her heart. The babes being hungry soon began to cry lustily. This brought the worthy couple to their senses, and soon Ahmed was on the road in search of a nurse for their unexpected family. Before long he found a suitable woman, and engaged her at a very generous wage. As soon as she arrived the cries of the infants were stilled immediately. On the following day two more nurses were engaged, and thus cared for the children, a boy and a girl, grew fat and strong.
In another town there was likewise a man who had no children, although, like Ahmed Aga, he greatly desired a son. So he and his wife prayed earnestly to Allah that he would give them a child, and when they learned that their prayers were to be answered, their rejoicing was unbounded. The good news came to the ears of a servant who at one time had been in that household, but having been dismissed by the wife for neglecting her duties, she was desperately jealous at the happiness which was coming to her former mistress. Determined to take her revenge, she presented herself as a nurse, and was engaged. In due time twin babies, a boy and a girl, were born; but while their mother was sleeping, and before ever their father had seen them, the false nurse put the children into a pot, and having sealed it carefully, cast it into the sea. While the husband was sleeping, the false woman sat by him and whispered in his ear so that he thought it was a dream sent by Allah. She told him that he had been deceived and had, after all, no child. As the mother had been asleep, she could not tell what had become of her children, and certainly they were nowhere to be found. So the husband, believing his dream, was very angry at what he thought was his wife’s attempt to deceive him, and he drove her out of his house. The poor creature had not a friend in the world, and went forth weeping bitterly.
She wandered on from one hill to another, until one day, although it was dark, it seemed as though each hill was a different colour from the others. Fear seized upon her heart and tears started from her eyes. Hunger and fatigue overcame her, and she knew not what to do. Seeing a tree, she climbed up to spend the night in it and await Allah’s pleasure toward her. Having settled herself among the leafy branches, she wept herself to sleep. When morning dawned she descended in the hope of meeting with a passer by or coming to a village where she might obtain a little bread.
But, alas! no aid was nigh, and after wandering for many hours she sank down from sheer exhaustion. Presently, however, she saw in the distance a shepherd, and, summoning the remainder of her little strength, she accosted him. Offering her bread, the shepherd asked her trouble. When he had heard it he took pity upon her and led her home to his wife, his son, and his daughter.
As time went on the poor woman had almost forgotten her sorrow, excepting her grief for the loss of her children, over whom she often sighed and wept. How fared they in the meantime?
With the good Ahmed Aga and his wife they grew up to their fourteenth year and went together to school. One day the boy was playing with a companion, who, jealous of his superiority over him, said: “Be off, you fatherless and motherless brat, found by Ahmed Aga on the seashore.” At these words the boy’s brow became clouded, and he ran away angrily to his foster-mother, telling her what had been said to him. She endeavoured to calm him, but that same night the boy dreamt of the shepherd’s hut and of his mother, who in the dream related all her sufferings. When he repeated the dream to his sister, lo! she also had had a similar dream. Then the boy knew that what his playfellows had taunted him with was no untruth, but the fact. They went together to their kind foster-father and told him what they had both dreamt. The good man was troubled, but confessed that he had indeed found them in a pot washed up by the waves; of their mother he knew nothing. The brother and sister were in despair at the thought of their poor mother living in a shepherd’s cottage. It was impossible to comfort them, and finally the boy declared his intention of setting out to find his mother. His sister was left behind in the kind hands of her foster-parents.
Spurred on by his heroic courage and anxiety for his mother, the boy made all haste, and as he lay down to rest under the stars one night the place of his mother’s sojourn was revealed to him in a dream. To cut our story shorter, we will only say that in one day he covered a five-days, journey without experiencing either hunger or fear. As he followed the course indicated in his dream he found his further progress barred by a hideous dragon. The boy had no weapon, but picking up a large stone he flung it at the ugly beast with such tremendous force that the creature reeled backward and fell to the earth. “If you are a man throw another stone at me,” shouted the dragon; but the youth went his way, leaving the dragon to perish.
Indefatigably the boy travelled, and in due time reached the valley where his mother had once spent the night in a tree. Here he stopped, and at the foot of the tree sought the rest that had long been denied him. W
hile he slept, the brother of the dead dragon, having heard what had happened, came in search of the boy. The monster’s heavy strides caused the earth to tremble and awoke the youth. “I am certain you are the youth who has killed my brother,” began the dragon. “Now it is my turn.” Saying this, with jaws foaming and fire issuing from his nostrils, he sprang upon the lad. In self-defence the youth grasped the dragon’s foreleg, using such strength that he tore it from the body and flung it away. Then the dragon sank down weakening from loss of blood, saying: “To him who has taken my life belongs my treasure.” The unwieldy beast rolled over and over and finally disappeared into a cavern at the foot of a mountain.
Prompted by curiosity, the youth glanced into the mouth of the cavern and saw a staircase leading downward. Descending, he found a palace,
which he entered and explored in all directions. In one apartment was a maiden sitting on a throne–a maiden so lovely that his heart was a thou sand times filled with love of her. On her part the maiden was enraptured with the youth’s comeliness; but, not knowing of the dragon’s destruction, she cried: “Woe unto us! If the dragon sees this youth he will kill us both.” Then addressing the youth she asked: “How came you into this palace of the Breathless Dragon? Whomsoever he looks upon is slain by his mere glance.”
Now the youth related to the maiden how he had slain both dragons, and he besought her to come away with him. As she appeared not to comprehend, he repeated his words and urged her to hasten, as he had other business to fulfil. “That being so,” said the maiden at last, “there is much here that we might take away with us.” The maiden leading the way and the youth following, they entered the forty rooms of the palace, each of which was filled with gold, diamonds, and precious stones. However, the youth said: “My dear, I have first an important duty to perform; when that is done, we will return and take away as much of this treasure as we please.”
Thus they departed, and at some distance saw the shepherd’s hut which sheltered the youth’s mother. At once he recognised it as the building seen in his dream. Hurrying up, he knocked at the door, and it was opened by his mother herself. Each recognised the other from their dreams, and they fell into each other’s arms.
Next morning they all set off together for the dragon’s palace. On the backs of the horse and donkey they brought with them, they packed as many sacks of gold and diamonds as the animals could possibly carry. Then they hastened, with brief pauses for rest, to the home of Ahmed Aga, where the youth rejoined his sister and the mother saw her daughter. Now the joyful woman was repaid for all her past sufferings, and they all lived happily together for many years.
The worthy shepherd’s son was betrothed to the youth’s sister, while the youth himself was betrothed to the maiden of the dragon’s palace. A suitable husband was found for the shepherd’s daughter, and they were all married on the same day, the festivities lasting forty days and forty nights, and their happiness for ever.

___________

___________

Richard & Mimi Farina – “Bold Marauder”

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The Poetry of Nazim Hikmet

Hymn To Life

The hair falling on your forehead

suddenly lifted.

Suddenly something stirred on the ground.

The trees are whispering

in the dark.

Your bare arms will be cold.
Far off

where we can’t see,

the moon must be rising.

It hasn’t reached us yet,

slipping through the leaves

to light up your shoulder.

But I know

a wind comes up with the moon.

The trees are whispering.

Your bare arms will be cold.
From above,

from the branches lost in the dark,

something dropped at your feet.

You moved closer to me.

Under my hand your bare flesh is like the fuzzy skin of a fruit.

Neither a song of the heart nor “common sense”–

before the trees, birds, and insects,

my hand on my wife’s flesh

is thinking.

Tonight my hand

can’t read or write.

Neither loving nor unloving…

It’s the tongue of a leopard at a spring,

a grape leaf,

a wolf’s paw.

To move, breathe, eat, drink.

My hand is like a seed

splitting open underground.

Neither a song of the heart nor “common sense,”

neither loving nor unloving.

My hand thinking on my wife’s flesh

is the hand of the first man.

Like a root that finds water underground,

it says to me:

“To eat, drink, cold, hot, struggle, smell, color–

not to live in order to die

but to die to live…”
And now

as red female hair blows across my face,

as something stirs on the ground,

as the trees whisper in the dark,

and as the moon rises far off

where we can’t see,

my hand on my wife’s flesh

before the trees, birds, and insects,

I want the right of life,

of the leopard at the spring, of the seed splitting open–

I want the right of the first man.

—

On Living

I

Living is no laughing matter:

you must live with great seriousness

like a squirrel, for example–

I mean without looking for something beyond and above living,

I mean living must be your whole occupation.

Living is no laughing matter:

you must take it seriously,

so much so and to such a degree

that, for example, your hands tied behind your back,

your back to the wall,

or else in a laboratory

in your white coat and safety glasses,

you can die for people–

even for people whose faces you’ve never seen,

even though you know living

is the most real, the most beautiful thing.

I mean, you must take living so seriously

that even at seventy, for example, you’ll plant

olive trees–

and not for your children, either,

but because although you fear death you don’t believe it,

because living, I mean, weighs heavier.
II

Let’s say you’re seriously ill, need surgery–

which is to say we might not get

from the white table.

Even though it’s impossible not to feel sad

about going a little too soon,

we’ll still laugh at the jokes being told,

we’ll look out the window to see it’s raining,

or still wait anxiously

for the latest newscast …

Let’s say we’re at the front–

for something worth fighting for, say.

There, in the first offensive, on that very day,

we might fall on our face, dead.

We’ll know this with a curious anger,

but we’ll still worry ourselves to death

about the outcome of the war, which could last years.

Let’s say we’re in prison

and close to fifty,

and we have eighteen more years, say,

before the iron doors will open.

We’ll still live with the outside,

with its people and animals, struggle and wind–

I mean with the outside beyond the walls.

I mean, however and wherever we are,

we must live as if we will never die.
III

This earth will grow cold,

a star among stars

and one of the smallest,

a gilded mote on blue velvet–

I mean this, our great earth.

This earth will grow cold one day,

not like a block of ice

or a dead cloud even

but like an empty walnut it will roll along

in pitch-black space …

You must grieve for this right now

–you have to feel this sorrow now–

for the world must be loved this much

if you’re going to say “I lived” …

—

Things I Didn’t Know I Loved
it’s 1962 March 28th

I’m sitting by the window on the Prague-Berlin train

night is falling

I never knew I liked

night descending like a tired bird on a smoky wet plain

I don’t like

comparing nightfall to a tired bird
I didn’t know I loved the earth

can someone who hasn’t worked the earth love it

I’ve never worked the earth

it must be my only Platonic love
and here I’ve loved rivers all this time

whether motionless like this they curl skirting the hills

European hills crowned with chateaus

or whether stretched out flat as far as the eye can see

I know you can’t wash in the same river even once

I know the river will bring new lights you’ll never see

I know we live slightly longer than a horse but not nearly as long as a crow

I know this has troubled people before

and will trouble those after me

I know all this has been said a thousand times before

and will be said after me
I didn’t know I loved the sky

cloudy or clear

the blue vault Andrei studied on his back at Borodino

in prison I translated both volumes of War and Peace into Turkish

I hear voices

not from the blue vault but from the yard

the guards are beating someone again

I didn’t know I loved trees

bare beeches near Moscow in Peredelkino

they come upon me in winter noble and modest

beeches are Russian the way poplars are Turkish

“the poplars of Izmir

losing their leaves. . .

they call me The Knife. . .

lover like a young tree. . .

I blow stately mansions sky-high”

in the Ilgaz woods in 1920 I tied an embroidered linen handkerchief

to a pine bough for luck
I never knew I loved roads

even the asphalt kind

Vera’s behind the wheel we’re driving from Moscow to the Crimea

Koktebele

formerly “Goktepé ili” in Turkish

the two of us inside a closed box

the world flows past on both sides distant and mute

I was never so close to anyone in my life

bandits stopped me on the red road between Bolu and Geredé

when I was eighteen

apart from my life I didn’t have anything in the wagon they could take

and at eighteen our lives are what we value least

I’ve written this somewhere before

wading through a dark muddy street I’m going to the shadow play

Ramazan night

a paper lantern leading the way

maybe nothing like this ever happened

maybe I read it somewhere an eight-year-old boy

going to the shadow play

Ramazan night in Istanbul holding his grandfather’s hand

his grandfather has on a fez and is wearing the fur coat

with a sable collar over his robe

and there’s a lantern in the servant’s hand

and I can’t contain myself for joy

flowers come to mind for some reason

poppies cactuses jonquils

in the jonquil garden in Kadikoy Istanbul I kissed Marika

fresh almonds on her breath

I was seventeen

my heart on a swing touched the sky

I didn’t know I loved flowers

friends sent me three red carnations in prison
I just remembered the stars

I love them too

whether I’m floored watching them from below

or whether I’m flying at their side
I have some questions for the cosmonauts

were the stars much bigger

did they look like huge jewels on black velvet

or apricots on orange

did you feel proud to get closer to the stars

I saw color photos of the cosmos in Ogonek magazine now don’t

be upset comrades but nonfigurative shall we say or abstract

well some of them looked just like such paintings which is to

say they were terribly figurative and concrete

my heart was in my mouth looking at them

they are our endless desire to grasp things

seeing them I could even think of death and not feel at all sad

I never knew I loved the cosmos
snow flashes in front of my eyes

both heavy wet steady snow and the dry whirling kind

I didn’t know I liked snow
I never knew I loved the sun

even when setting cherry-red as now

in Istanbul too it sometimes sets in postcard colors

but you aren’t about to paint it that way

I didn’t know I loved the sea

except the Sea of Azov

or how much
I didn’t know I loved clouds

whether I’m under or up above them

whether they look like giants or shaggy white beasts
moonlight the falsest the most languid the most petit-bourgeois

strikes me

I like it
I didn’t know I liked rain

whether it falls like a fine net or splatters against the glass my

heart leaves me tangled up in a net or trapped inside a drop

and takes off for uncharted countries I didn’t know I loved

rain but why did I suddenly discover all these passions sitting

by the window on the Prague-Berlin train

is it because I lit my sixth cigarette

one alone could kill me

is it because I’m half dead from thinking about someone back in Moscow

her hair straw-blond eyelashes blue
the train plunges on through the pitch-black night

I never knew I liked the night pitch-black

sparks fly from the engine

I didn’t know I loved sparks

I didn’t know I loved so many things and I had to wait until sixty

to find it out sitting by the window on the Prague-Berlin train

watching the world disappear as if on a journey of no return
19 April 1962

Moscow

—-

Last Will And Testament

Comrades, if I don’t live to see the day

– I mean,if I die before freedom comes –

take me away

and bury me in a village cemetery in Anatolia.
The worker Osman whom Hassan Bey ordered shot

can lie on one side of me, and on the other side

the martyr Aysha, who gave birth in the rye

and died inside of forty days.
Tractors and songs can pass below the cemetery –

in the dawn light, new people, the smell of burnt gasoline,

fields held in common, water in canals,

no drought or fear of the police.
Of course, we won’t hear those songs:

the dead lie stretched out underground

and rot like black branches,

deaf, dumb, and blind under the earth.
But, I sang those songs

before they were written,

I smelled the burnt gasoline

before the blueprints for the tractors were drawn.
As for my neighbors,

the worker Osman and the martyr Aysha,

they felt the great longing while alive,

maybe without even knowing it.
Comrades, if I die before that day, I mean

– and it’s looking more and more likely –

bury me in a village cemetery in Anatolia,

and if there’s one handy,

a plane tree could stand at my head,

I wouldn’t need a stone or anything.
Moscow, Barviha Hospital

_______________

Max Ernst Bio:

Max Ernst was born on April 2, 1891 in Brühl, near Cologne. Ernst began studying classical philology but then became interested in art and literature through the 1912 Cologne Sonderbund Exhibit and his friendship with August Macke, whom he met in 1910-11. He became acquainted with the ‘Blaue Reiter’, Apollinaire, Delaunay, Georges Grosz and Wieland Herzfelde as well as Hans Arp.
He fought in World War I in France and Poland, and recovered from clinical death, an experience which was to deepen his decision to take up art. Married the art historian Luise Straus (1918) and the next year, visited Paul Klee and created his first paintings, block prints and collages, and experimented with mixed media. Along with J. T. Baargeld and Hans Arp, he founded the Cologne Dada group, and in 1921 was invited by André Breton to Paris, where he befriended Tristan Tzara and Sophie Taeuber.
A year later, he moved there and illustrated the collage-novel Les Malheurs des immortels, to which Paul Éluard provided the texts. Illustrated further books of poetry by Eluard (1923) and created 17 wall murals for Eluard’s house in Eaubonne (rediscovered in the 60′s and exhibited).
In 1925 Ernst developed the frottage technique as it would be employed in his entire work process thereafter until his later graphic works. It was during this period that he created his series Histoire Naturelle, Bird Paintings, and Forests, and in 1926, the sets for Sergei Diaghilev’s Russian Ballet. He collaborated with Joan Miró, and then with Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí on the film l’Age d’Or.
In 1927 he married Marie-Berthe Aurenche. Two years later, he created another collage-novel La Femme à 100 Têtes. His first exhibit in New York took place in 1931. Spent time in Maloja with Alberto Giacometti (1934) and created the collage-novel Une Semaine de Bonté. Began using the décalcomanie technique – a sort of decal painting (1936) and did the set decoration for Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Enchaîné (1937). In the mean time, his work was being confiscated in Germany.
Ernst joined Leonora Carrington, and moved to southern France, Saint-Martin d’Ardèche in 1938. In 1939, he was sent to a concentration camp but set free again by Eluard’s appeal. The very next year he was again sent to a concentration camp, this one in Aix-en-Provence, from which he attempted to escape twice.
Emigrated to the USA (1941), settled in New York and married the art collector Peggy Guggenheim. He began exhibiting in 1942 and met with other émigrés such as David Hare, André Breton and Marcel Duchamp. Began working on new plastic art (1944). Met the artist Dorothea Tanning (1942), they took life-time vows to each other in 1946 and moved to Sedona, Arizona. He wrote the treatise Beyond Painting (1948) and only returned to Europe on a visit in 1949-50.
A retrospective of his works was held on his 60th birthday in Brühl (though he rejected the honorary citizenship later offered to him). Guest lecturer in Hawaii. In 1953 he returned to Paris but was excluded from the Surrealist circle. At the 27th Biennial in Venice (1954), received the first prize, which helped him to get financially back on his feet. Settled in Touraine in 1955 and became a French citizen in 1958.
On his 70th birthday, his work was shown in various exhibitions, among others at the Tate Gallery in London and the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne. In 1963 he and his wife Dorothea Tanning moved to the southern French town of Seilans. A retrospective was held at the Kunsthaus in Zurich. In 1964, his graphic series ‘Maximiliana’ printed, an important work. He designed stage sets and a fountain for the city of Ambois (1968). In 1975, retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and the Galeries Nationales du Grand-Palais in Paris published a complete catalogue of his works, the Spies / Leppien Catalogue. A book in two volumes on his graphic work from 1906-1925 published.
Max Ernst died on April 1, 1976 in Paris

_______________
Mimi & Richard Farina performing “Pack Up Your Sorrows” and a small chat with Mimi

________________

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

Started writing this entry back on the 5th of June… It has built up a bit of steam since then. I have gotten side tracked on various issues; doing layout for a poetry book, painting on a house of incredible scary heights, watching the weather go from screwy to worse, and realizing you can’t always do it all. (though I try… and try)
Saturday: A Contemplation On Iran & The Shift:

Watching Twitter today, and the various media outlets, I have come to the conclusion that what we are seeing is the tip of the iceberg; the world may indeed be moving into the phase it was 41 years ago with the Paris Uprising, Chicago, the Martin Luther King Riots… Mexico City etc… I saw it pointed out that there is conflict right across from the Indus/Himalaya complex to the Mediterranean… and if that wasn’t enough North Korea and parts of Central & South America (and of course Africa) are blowing as well at this point. I am talking about the possibility of World Revolution at this point; for our children this may be the summer that they will remember and point to as “Everything Changed That Summer”… I am not wishing violence, indeed the counter to that, but so many factors are coming into play at this point. The economic shifts, the glaring in-equalities and the abandonment of any semblance of egalitarian balance amongst various populations, the sheer desperation of the greater number of the oppressed everywhere. There must be balance; and there will be in the end, unfortunately we may be moving into a very uncomfortable time of change and all the attending mayhem of the patterns of redress and sorting out.
It is amazing watching the news via Youtube and services (we don’t have a TV as much as a video monitor) and seeing the sheer bravery of the young of Tehran.
Sunday: The Neighborhood Tribes – Avian

I have been out walking most mornings from around 6:00 – 8:00am… the earlier the better for checking out the various creatures about their business and play. The Crows have been busy teaching their young ones how to fly. It is a flock event; everyone gets into the act, calling out encouragement, guarding the perimeter (I was roundly told off a couple of times walking under the trees they were all in…) I noticed a territorial element I hadn’t noticed before: The Crows occupy certain neighborhoods, the Jays others, though they will raid each others holdings on occasion. The Starlings raid everywhere, and without regard. The Robins are in familial groups, and tend not to flock during mid-summer, but in spring and fall.
We are working quite a bit in the yard, and setting up for the heat of late summer. This includes setting up for chickens & a barbecue area so we can cook outside in the worse of the heat. It has been raining and cool most days of late, but the summer does hit strongly in July and into early fall with August.
We bid farewell to Marley, Austyn’s family pup. He developed lymphoma, and the vet came by from what I understood today to ease his exit from this life. He was a very, very sweet dog.
One of the world’s greatest musicians past this week: Ali Akbar Khan. I first heard his music some 44 years ago. I never lost my appreciation of his great art. We will feature some of it hopefully this week on Turfing.
We are featuring the music of Karen Dalton, perhaps the best folk singer you have never heard of, although she was very influential on the works of Robert Dylan and others… We also are featuring the tales of The Selkie, heading up to the shores of Scotland, Ireland, the Hebrides and further to Iceland. We have some Anarchy quotes, and the brilliant poetry of Kalidasa, Indian Poet and Playwright…
Have a Happy Solstice! Remember the dance of life and how it flows through us all!
Bright Blessings,

Gwyllm

_________________
On The Menu:

The Links

The Anarchy Quotes

Karen Dalton – It Hurts Me Too

The Seal’s Skin – Icelandic Folktale

The Great Selkie of Sule Skerrie

Sean & The Selkie

The Poetry of Kalidasa

Kalidasa Bio

Karen Dalton “Blues Jumped The Rabbit”

_______________

The Links:

Karen Dalton… the best singer you have never heard of….

Thanks to Mr. Webster… Serpents A Short Meditation on Ophidian Botany

Fighting For Their And Our Lives…

The Military Looks To The Book…

Once The Seat Of Kings…

Thanks To Tom In Tacoma: “The Sacred Plants Of The Maya”

_______________

The Anarchy Quotes:

You can’t mine coal without machine guns. –Richard B. Mellon, Congressional testimony quoted in Time, June 14, 1937
A democracy cannot be both ignorant and free. –Thomas Jefferson
The great are great only because we are on our knees. Let us rise! –Max Stirner, The Ego and His Own
The liberty of man consists solely in this: that he obeys natural laws because he has himself recognized them as such, and not because they have been externally imposed upon him by any extrinsic will whatever, divine or human, collective or individual. –Mikhail Bakunin, God and the State
In a word, we reject all legislation, all authority, and all privileged, licensed, official, and legal influence, even though arising from universal suffrage, convinced that it can turn only to the advantage of a dominant minority of exploiters against the interests of the immense majority in subjection to them. –Mikhail Bakunin, God and the State

_______________
Karen Dalton – It Hurts Me Too

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The Seal’s Skin – Icelandic Folktale

Once in the east of Mýrdalur a man went along the cliffs on the seashore early in the morning. He came to a mouth of a cave and heard the sound of merrymaking and dancing inside. Nearby he saw many seals’ skins. He took one of the skins, brought it home and locked it in a chest.
In the daytime he came again to the cave. There sat a young and pretty woman who was naked and cried desperately. She was the seal whose skin the man had taken. He let her dress herself, comforted her and brought her home with him. She has become attached to him, but did not get on with others. She often sat and looked at the sea.
Some time later the man married her. They lived in harmony and had children. The farmer kept the seal’s skin locked up in the chest and had the key with him wherever he went. Many years later he once went outdoors and left the key at home, under his pillow. Others say that the farmer went to celebrate Christmas with his men, but his wife was ill and could not go with them. While he changed his clothes, he left the key in a pocket of his everyday wear. When he came back home, the chest was open, and both the woman and the skin disappeared.
She had taken the key, looked into the chest out of curiosity and found the skin there. She could not resist the temptation, bade farewell to her children, put on the skin and plunged into the sea. And before she plunged into the sea, they say, she whispered:
Where have I to flee?

I’ve seven kids in the sea

And seven kids on dry land.
They say the man grieved much for that. Afterwards, when he went fishing, a seal often swam round his boat, and it seemed that tears ran from her eyes. Ever since that man always had good catch and was lucky.
When their children went to the shore for a walk, people often saw a seal that swam in the sea not far from them, both when they were on land and near water, and threw motley fish and nice sea shells to them. But their mother never came back.

____________________
The Great Selkie of Sule Skerrie
1.An earthly nourris sits and sings,

And aye, she sings, by lily wean!

Little ken I my bairn’s father,

Far less the land where he dwells in.
2.Then he arose at her bed-feet,

And a grumbly guest, I’m sure was he:

“Here am I, thy bairns father,

Although I be not comelie.”

3.”I am a man upon the land,

I am a Selkie in the sea;

And when I’m far and far frae land,

My dwelling is in Sule Skerrie.”
4.”It was na weel,” quo the maiden fair.

“It was na weel, indeed,” quo she,

“That the Great Selkie of Sule Skerrie

Suld hae come and aught a bairn to me.”
5.Now he has taen a purse of gold,

And he has pat it upon her knee,

Sayin, “Gie to me my little young son,

And tak thee up thy nourris-fee.”
6.Ane it shall come to pass on a simmer’s day,

When the sin shines het on evera stane,

That I will tak my wee young son,

And teach him for to swim the faem.
7.And thou shall marry a proud gunner,

And a proud gunner I’m sure he’ll be,

And the very first shot that ere he shoots,

He’ll shoot baith my young son and me.

___________________
Sean & The Selkie

by Grainne Rowland
The sun was just about to set. Three tired fishermen plodded along the narrow coast road to their homes. They were famished for their evening meals and looking forward to a bit of a rest.
Sean was the first around a bend in the road. He stopped so suddenly that the others bumped into him.
“Shhh!” Sean whispered. “Look!”
The three stared at the most beautiful woman they had ever seen. She sat on the rocks combing her long red hair.
“Who is she?” asked one. “I’ve never seen her before.”
Sean answered, “She’s got to be a selkie. Look, there’s her skin lying on the rock beside her.”
Patrick whispered, “You’re right. Since I was a young lad, people have told stories of the selkies, the seal people. But this is the first time I’ve ever seen one.”
Sean crept forward and made a quick grab; he stood up with what looked like a seal’s skin. He held it tightly with both hands.
The woman looked up with a sad expression on her face.
“Will you not give back my skin?” she asked sadly.
“No,” said Sean. “I am the only man in the village without a wife. I know selkies make the best wives. You will be my wife.”
“I will miss the sea if I come with you,” she said. “But as long as you keep my skin, I must stay with you.”
“You may come to the sea whenever you wish,” said Sean. “But I will keep your skin.”
Sean was married three days later, and his two friends were at the wedding. No one but the three knew that Sean’s wife was a selkie. As for Sean, he locked the selkie’s skin in a strong chest and kept the key on a chain around his neck.
Sean’s marriage was a good one. His fortunes improved as soon as he was married. He soon owned his own fishing fleet, and his two old fishing friends worked for him. His wife gave him three strong sons and two beautiful daughters. Sean was very happy.
Sean’s wife spent as much time as she could by the sea. She loved especially to sit by the sea on a night with a full moon. It was then she met her own people, the seal people, who came to console her on her fate among humans. Often, after they left, she would weep. How she missed her own people!
After many, many years, Sean decided that he was so rich that his family must move to a bigger, grander house. As they were all stepping into an elegant carriage to go to the new mansion, Sean’s wife went once more into the house to take a last look around. In one corner, she noticed something that looked like a small pile of rubbish.
Curious, she knelt down to see what it was; her heart began to beat faster. It was an old chest, rotting with age! Could it be? She quickly searched through it. There it was! Her skin! Her heart singing, she took it, ran out the door and raced down to the sea. As she reached the sea, she heard Sean chasing after her and shouting his love. But, before he could catch up, she threw on her skin. In front of his eyes, she changed back into her seal form and then swam far out to sea. She was never seen again.

____________________
The Poetry of Kalidasa:

Seasonal Cycle – Summer

“Oh, dear, this utterly sweltering season of the highly rampant sun is drawing nigh, and it will always be good enough to go on taking daytime baths, as the lakes and rivers will still be with plenteous waters, and at the end of the day, nightfall will be pleasant with fascinating moon, and in such nights Love-god can somehow be almost mollified…[who tortured us in the previous vernal season… but now without His sweltering us, we can happily enjoy the nights devouring cool soft drinks and dancing and merrymaking in outfields…]
“Oh, beloved one, somewhere the moon shoved the blackish columns of night aside, somewhere else the palace-chambers with water [showering, sprinkling and splashing] machines are highly exciting, and else where the matrices of gems, [like coolant pearls and moon-stone, etc.,] are there, and even the pure sandalwood is liquefied [besides other coolant scents,] thus this season gets an adoration from all the people…
“The beloved ones will enjoy the summer’s clear late nights while they are atop the rooftops of buildings that are delightful and fragranced well, while they savour the passion intensifiers like strong drinks and while the ladylove’s face suspires the bouquets of those drinks together with melodious instrumental and vocal music…
“The women are ameliorating the heat of their lovers with their chicly silken coolant fineries gliding onto their rotund fundaments, for they are knotted loosely, and on those silks glissading are their golden cinctures with their dangling tassels that are unfastened on and off, and with their buxom bosoms that are bedaubed with sandal-paste and semi-covered with pearly strings and golden lavalieres, and with their locks of hair that are sliding onto their faces, which locks are fragrant with bath-time emulsions, which are just applied before their oil bath…
“Brightly coloured with the reddish foot-paint that is akin to the colour of lac’s reddish resin, adorned with anklets that are festooned with jingling bells, whose tintinnabulations on their stepping after stepping mimic the clucks of swans, with such feet those women with bumpy behinds are rendering the hearts of people impassioned, in these days of pre-summer…
“These days the bosoms of womenfolk are bedaubed with scents and sandal-paste, and they are given out to snowily and whitely pearly pendants that are sported on those bosoms, and even their hiplines are with the dangling golden griddle-strings, with such a lovely ostentation whose heart is it, that does not fill with raptures…
“The seams of limbs of ladies of age are conquered by the often emerging sweat, thus those peaky bosomed lustful ladies are presently banding their bosoms with softish fineries, casting aside their roughish apparels …
“The rustles of air comprising the aroma of watered sandal-paste, blown off by the fans with peacocks’ plumage, and the rustle of strings of pearls when the roundish bosoms of loves are hugged, together with the subtle melody of string instruments, and subtly sung intonations of singers, now appear to awaken Love-god, Manmatha, who is as though asleep after his manoeuvres in the last spring season…
“On leisurely seeing the faces of the maids that are comfortably sleeping well on the tops of whitish edifices, the moon of these nights is highly ecstasized, for he is unpossessed with any such flawless face, as his own face is flawed with rabbit-like, deer-like foibles, and when the night dwindles, he doubtlessly goes into state of pallidity, as though ashamed to show his face to the flawless sun…
“The intolerable westerly wind of the summer is up-heaving the clouds of dust, even the earth is ablaze, set by the blazing sun, and the itinerants whose hearts are already put to blaze by the blazing called the detachment from their ladyloves, and now it has become impossible for them even to look at the blazing earth, to tread further…
“The reigning sun’s torridity rendered the animals parched, and with unquenchable thirst highly shrivelled are their tongues, throats and lips, and on seeing kneaded blackish mascara like mirages on the sky in another forest, that are cloudlike in their shine, those animals are rushing there, presuming them to be water…
“The women of charm are with smiles and slanted looks, and now they are on par with the twilights that are ornamented with a beautiful ornament called moon, and they are now decorating themselves confusedly and they are inciting the incorporeal Love-god in the hearts of itinerants…
“Extremely seared by the rays of sun, and even by the already seared dust on the pathway, with its slithery motion and downcast hood, repeatedly suspiring when being scalded thus awfully, that serpent is sinking down under the pave of peacock’s plumage, distrait of the fact that a peacock is an enemy of serpents, thus distrait is the relative danger from a born enemy or from the searing summer…
“Thwarted are the valorousness and venturesomeness of that king of animals, the lion, for the thirst is abnormal, thereby gaping his mouth much lengthily, and suspiring repeatedly with a lengthened and dangling tongue, and repeatedly whisking his frontal hair of the mane, that lion is not pawing the elephants, though they are at his nearby, and though they both of them are born rivals, thus the scalding summer cooled off their mutual contempt…
“Verily dried up are their throats, but somehow some cool water remaining in their trunks is brought to those dry throats with the prehensility of their trunks, but too scanty is that water for those mega-vores, further muchly scorched by sun’s scorching rays and overpowered by heightened thirst, even those water-seeking tuskers are unafraid of those nearby lions, as negligible is the physical danger than the natural danger…
“The scorching sunrays that are akin to the tongues of blazed up Ritual-fire, by them the bodies as well as the souls of peacocks are wilted, thus they wedge their faces in the pack of their plumage for certain coolness, and though they mark the serpents that are milling about under the very same plumage through the plumes and feathers, they peck not those serpents to death, as their priority is to cool off their faces and heads…
“The slime in the ponds is dried up but in some areas Bhadramusta grass is available, and while the herd of wild boars is digging up that grass with their long and broad snouts for a piggish slumber, the sunrays have highly sweltered their backs, but that herd dug the dry swamp more and more, as though to enter the interior of earth, to get a mucky, miry, muddy slumber…
“With the unbearable prickly heat of sunrays highly seared is a frog, and jumping up from a pond with mud and muddy water, it jumped to sit under the shade of a parasol, called the hood of a snake… neither thirstier frog is aware that it is the shade of a snake’s hood, nor the thirstiest snake is aware that it is shading a thirsty frog…
“When each other elephant is highly huddling, belaboured is that lake by their elephantine limbs, and completely uprooted are the tall slender stems of lilies and lotuses of that lake, without any remnants of standing lotuses or lilies, thus trampled and agglutinated with mud, they are heaped up under the feet of elephants, and ill-fated are the fishes when trodden by elephants underfoot, and the Saarasa waterfowls are fleeing with fear of this rumpus…
“Akin to sunshine upcast is irradiance of the jewel on its hood, and wigwagging is its twinned tongue licking the air, and it is seared by its own venom, by fiery soil, and by the searing sun as well, and thus tottering thirstily, that hooded serpent is not draining the dregs of frogs, to the dregs…
“Frothily gaping and reeling are the two-pieced snouts, and jerkily extruding are the lightly re
ddened tongues, and staggering thirstily looking for water with upraised snouts, those herds of she-buffalos are extruding from the caves of mountain with such snouts and gaits, wherein they took shade from the scorching sun so far, but thirst drove them out of those cool caves…
“Extremely withered as though by wildfire and utterly shrivelled are the tender stalks of crops, and windswept by harsh winds they are uprooted and completely wilted and reduced to straw, and all over scorched are they in an overall manner as the water is evaporated, and if seen from highlands till the end of forest, this summer is foisting upon the onlookers a kind of disconcert, as the straw in the wind about the monsoon is unnoticeable…
“Perching on the trees with wilted leaves, flocks of birds are hyperventilating, the overtired troops of monkeys are going nigh of viny caves on the mountain, the water-craving herds of buffalos are rambling hither and thither, the straight flying Sharabha birds are nose-diving into wells and easily lifting up the water…
“The wildfire, that is simulative of a just blossomed bright and fierily ochreish safflower, is exceedingly speedy and further whipped up by the speed of the wind it is eagerly embracing the treetops, that are on the banks of lakes and rivers, with tongues of fire, onto which trees the apices of climber plants are eager to embrace, thus that wildfire has burnt down every quarter of land, in a trice…
“That wildfire, now intensified by the gusts, is blazing the valleys of mountains, and thus skittering across it entered the stands of bamboos, only to shatter them in a second with clattering rattles, then escalated by gusts it is overspreading the straw fields, then from their within, on smacking the perimeter of straw-field, it is broiling the herds of deer, tumultuously …
“That wildfire taking a rebirth in the copses of silk-cotton trees is extremely blazing, and from within the cavities of the trees it is erupting with the glint of golden yellow, and thus uprooting the wizened leaves on wizened branches along with their trees, and then hurled by gusts it is whirling everywhere in that woodland unto its edging…
“When fire scorched their bodies, their dichotomic thinking of mutual hostilities had to be discarded, and those elephants, buffalos and lions come together as friends, and when blighted by the fire, they are quickly exiting their habitual confines to enter the areas of rivers that have broad sandbanks…
“Oh, dear melodious singer, what if the summer is scorching… fragrant lotuses are overlaid on coolant waters, agreeably refreshing is the fragrance of Trumpet flowers, comfortable is the fresh water in bathing pools, pleasurable are those moonbeams, and with these pearly pendants and these jasmine garlands, let our simmering summer nights enjoyably slip by, while we abide on the tops of buildings right under the moonscape, savouring potations and amidst music and song…

Kalidasa

Indian poet and dramatist, Kalidasa lived sometime between the reign of Agnimitra, the second Shunga king (c. 170 BC) who was the hero of one of his dramas, and the Aihole inscription of AD 634 which praises Kalidasa’s poetic skills. Most scholars now associate him with the reign of Candra Gupta II (reigned c. 380-c. 415).
Little is known about Kalidasa’s life. According to legend, the poet was known for his beauty which brought him to the attention of a princess who married him. However, as legend has it, Kalidasa had grown up without much education, and the princess was ashamed of his ignorance and coarseness. A devoted worshipper of the goddess Kali (his name means literally Kali’s slave), Kalidasa is said to have called upon his goddess for help and was rewarded with a sudden and extraordinary gift of wit. He is then said to have become the most brilliant of the “nine gems” at the court of the fabulous king Vikramaditya of Ujjain. Legend also has it that he was murdered by a courtesan in Sri Lanka during the reign of Kumaradasa.
Kalidasa’s first surviving play, Malavikagnimitra or Malavika and Agnimitra tells the story of King Agnimitra, a ruler who falls in love with the picture of an exiled servant girl named Malavika. When the queen discovers her husbands passion for this girl, she becomes infuriated and has Malavika imprisoned, but as fate would have it, Malavika is in fact a true-born princess, thus legitimizing the affair.
Kalidasa’s second play, generally considered his masterpiece, is the Shakuntala which tells the story of another king, Dushyanta, who falls in love with another girl of lowly birth, the lovely Shakuntala. This time, the couple is happily married and things seem to be going smoothly until Fate intervenes. When the king is called back to court by some pressing business, his new bride unintentionally offends a saint who puts a curse on her, erasing the young girl entirely from the king’s memory. Softening, however, the saint concedes that the king’s memory will return when Shakuntala returns to him the ring he gave her. This seems easy enough–that is, until the girl loses the ring while bathing. And to make matters worse, she soon discovers that she is pregnant with the king’s child. But true love is destined to win the day, and when a fisherman finds the ring, the king’s memory returns and all is well. Shakuntala is remarkable not only for it’s beautiful love poetry, but also for its abundant humor which marks the play from beginning to end.
The last of Kalidasa’s surviving plays, Vikramorvashe or Urvashi Conquered by Valor, is more mystical than the earlier plays. This time, the king (Pururavas) falls in love with a celestial nymph named Urvashi. After writing her mortal suitor a love letter on a birch leaf, Urvashi returns to the heavens to perform in a celestial play. However, she is so smitten that she misses her cue and pronounces her lover’s name during the performance. As a punishment for ruining the play, Urvashi is banished from heaven, but cursed to return the moment her human lover lays eyes on the child that she will bear him. After a series of mishaps, including Urvashi’s temporary transformation into a vine, the curse is eventually lifted, and the lovers are allowed to remain together on Earth. Vikramorvashe is filled poetic beauty and a fanciful humor that is reminiscent of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
In addition to his plays, Kalidasa wrote two surviving epic poems Raghuvamsha (“Dynasty of Raghu”) and Kumarasambhava (“Birth of the War God”), as well as the lyric “Meghaduta” (“Cloud Messenger”). He is generally considered to be the greatest Indian writer of any epoch.
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Karen Dalton “Blues Jumped The Rabbit”

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Infinity is that.

Infinity is this.

From Infinity, Infinity has come into existence.

From Infinity, when Infinity is taken away, Infinity remains. -Sri Chimoy…

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I have been working on working, so to speak. More soon, I promise.
Gwyllm

“Whether one believes in a religion or not, and whether one believes in rebirth or not, there isn’t anyone who doesn’t appreciate kindness and compassion.”

-Dalai Lama

Welcome to the new Earthrites.org Turfing Blog!
A big thanks to our friend Doug Fraser for helping me with the transition from our old server to our new server. I am very, very excited! This is allowing me to change a good many things on Earthrites.org, and to head towards our new direction! Earthrites.org and Gwyllm-Arts.com have started transitioning to a new set up as well. First is on the design level and contents on Earthrites.org is starting to transition over the weekend and next next.
Stay tuned for some pleasant surprises!

Bright Blessings!

Gwyllm

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On The Menu:

On Rebirth – The Quotes

Art Set To Music: Gil Bruvel

Fatimah, Mary and the Divine Feminine in Islam

The Poetry Of Hafiz

Art Set To Music:Mark Kostabi

Art: Gwyllm

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On Rebirth – The Quotes:

“Life, death and rebirth are inevitable. ”

– Rig Veda

“After attaining Me the great souls do not incur rebirth, the impermanent home of misery, because they have attained the highest perfection.”

– Bhagavad Gita

“It quite often happens that the old man is subject to the delusion of a great moral renewal and rebirth, and from this experience he passes judgments on the work and course of his life, as if he had only now become clear-sighted; and yet the inspiration behind this feeling of well-being and these confident judgements is not wisdom, but weariness .”

– Friedrich Nietzsche

“Their comings and goings in reincarnation do not end; through death and rebirth, they are wasting away.”

– Sri Guru Granth Sahib

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Art Set To Music: Gil Bruvel

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Fatimah, Mary and the Divine Feminine in Islam
At the very core of Islamic philosophy there is evidence of what can be called a vision of the Motherhood of God.
In the first Sura of the Koran, the Fatiha that is recited by millions of Muslims in their daily devotions, God is called Al Rahmin, the merciful and compassionate one. “Ramin” is derived from the Arabic for “womb” or “matrix”, mercy is also a feminine attribute, and so Muslims are reminded that God can be either woman or man. Every day God is compared to a mother and woman.
While the Muslim vision is often perceived to be authoritarian and punitive the Koran, on close inspection, is filled with descriptions and vision of God’s more feminine attributes such as gentleness, providence, love, universal compassion and tender-heartedness.
Muhammad was himself a living example of the Divine’s infinite capacity for forgiveness: many times he forgave enemies who had committed unspeakable atrocities against him and his brethren.
The religious intolerance that characterises the behaviour of many Muslim communities today is inconsistent with the heritage of tolerance that is professed by the Islamic tradition. For example, the Koran clearly states in several passages that any person who lives a life of holy reverence is welcomed into paradise regardless of their religion. Muhammad openly praises both Judaism (Abraham is deeply respected within the Koran) and Christianity (Muhammad frequently praises Jesus and Mary in the Koran).
Even more surprising is the Koran’s reverence for Mary, mother of Christ. Muhammad (and also in later Islamic theological scriptures) regarded Mary as the most marvellous of all women, a high adept and living example of the pure and holy life. Later Koranic commentaries describe Mary as an intervening force between God (Allah) and humanity. This intervening force is characterised by Allah’s mercy, forgiveness, sweetness and humility- the embodiment of Allah’s love for creation.
When Muhammad retook Mecca he began a programme of removing the pagan influences from the Kaaba, the most holy of Muslim sites. He removed many frescoes and images that he considered inauspicious but he specifically left on the walls a fresco of the Virgin Mary and her child.
In one of the most powerful Hadiths ( prophetic sayings of Muhammad) it is reported that Muhammad said, “Paradise is at the feet of the Mother”. Does this suggest that the feminine aspect of God is an important and essential pathway to the attainment of supreme consciousness?
Muhammad’s peak defining experience, called the Meraj, saw him elevated through the seven heavens to the realm of God Almighty at the resplendant Sidrath where he communed with God, received his divine visions and instructions and was placed on the inexorable course of his life-mission to establish Islam. Muhammad was escorted by the archangel Gabriel (a masculine force) but the vehicle upon which Muhammad rode was the beautiful “Buraq”. The Buraq was a white horse with wings and the face of a woman! Clearly suggesting that the great power by which Muhammad was elevated to the level of supreme consciousness was ultimately feminine in nature! Some scholars say that the Buraq is an Islamic symbol of the Kundalini, a force that Eastern Yogis describe as the Goddess or Divine Mother.
Fatimah is another prominent female in the Islamic tradition. Muhammad revered Fatimah as if she were a divine being, saying “Allah, The Most High; is pleased when Fatimah is pleased. He is angered; whenever Fatimah is angered!”
Whenever Fatimah would go to the house of Muhammad, he would stand up out of respect for her and honour her by giving her a special place to seat herself in his house. He regarded her as a sort of primordial woman, a symbol of divine womanhood giving her many holy names, such as: Siddiqah; The Honest, The Righteous; Al-Batool, Pure Virgin; Al-Mubarakah, The Blessed One; .Al-Tahirah, The Virtuous, The Pure, Al-Zakiyah ;The Chaste, The Unblemished ;Al-Radhiatul Mardhiah, She who is gratified and who shall be satisfied; Al-Muhaddathah, A person other than a Prophet, that the angels speak to; Al-Zahra, The Splendid; Al-Zahirah, The Luminous.
Shias revere the person of Fatimah, Muhammad’s daughter and mother of the line of inspired imams who embodied the divine truth for their generation. As such, Fatimah is associated with Sophia, the divine wisdom, which gives birth to all knowledge of God. She has thus become another symbolic equivalent of the Great Mother.
Sunni Islam has also drawn inspiration from the female. The philosopher Muid ad-Din ibn al-Arabi (1165-1240) saw a young girl in Mecca surrounded by light and realised that, for him, she was an incarnation of the divine Sophia. He believed that women were the most potent icons of the sacred, because they inspired a love in men which must ultimately be directed to God, the only true object of love.
More generally speaking Muslims are reminded in the Koran that humans can experience and speak about God only in symbols. Everything in the world is a sign (aya) of God; so women can also be a revelation of the divine. Ibn al-Arabi argued that humans have a duty to create theophanies for themselves, by means of the creative imagination that pierces the imperfect exterior of mundane reality and glimpses the divine within. The faculty of imagination is commonly associated with the Divine Feminine.
While official Islam may not consistently describe the role of the Divine Feminine, this principle has been described and explored at length in the more esoteric Islamic tradition of Sufism. Sufism emphasises passionate, mystical adoration of God. Many Sufis (and other mystics in other religions) seek a spiritual union between themselves and the divine principle not unlike that between a child (the Sufi) and his mother (God) or a bride (Sufi) and the husband (God).
The Sufi poetry teaches the feminine qualities of joy, love, tenderness and self sacrifice on a path of true knowledge derived from the spiritual heart. The spiritual rebirth of the individual is not unlike the trial and tribulation of physical childbirth, according to the Sufis. They take the principle of divine love and use it to facilitate the process of alchemical transformation from mundane human to spiritual being.
The fanaticism that we see in modern Islam is a new development in a religion that, in its early history, was famous for its tolerance and respect for other religions. In Islam’s classical period in medieval Spain and Egypt perhaps only Buddhism rivalled Islam’s tolerance. The fundamentalism that characterises the behaviour of many of today’s Muslims is in fact anti-Koranic.
A Sufi Ode to the Divine Mother

On the face of the earth there is no one more beautiful than You

Wherever I go I wear your image in my heart

Whenever I fall in a despondent mood I remember your image

And my spirit rises a thousand fold

Your advent is the blossom time of the Universe

O Mother you have showered your choicest blessings upon me

Also remember me on the Day of Judgement

I don’t know if I will go to heaven or hell

But wherever I go, please always abide in me.

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The Poetry Of Hafiz

(older translations…!)
I Cease Not From Desire

I cease not from desire till my desire

Is satisfied; or let my mouth attain

My love’s red mouth, or let my soul expire,

Sighed from those lips that sought her lips in vain.

Others may find another love as fair;

Upon her threshold I have laid my head,

The dust shall cover me, still lying there,

When from my body life and love have fled.
My soul is on my lips ready to fly,

But grief beats in my heart and will not cease,

Because not once, not once before I die,

Will her sweet lips give all my longing peace.

My breath is narrowed down to one long sigh

For a red mouth that burns my thoughts like fire;

When will that mouth draw near and make reply

To one whose life is straitened with desire?
When I am dead, open my grave and see

The cloud of smoke that rises round thy feet:

In my dead heart the fire still burns for thee;

Yea, the smoke rises from my winding-sheet!

Ah, come, Beloved! for the meadows wait

Thy coming, and the thorn bears flowers instead

Of thorns, the cypress fruit, and desolate

Bare winter from before thy steps has fled.
Hoping within some garden ground to find

A red rose soft and sweet as thy soft cheek,

Through every meadow blows the western wind,

Through every garden he is fain to seek.

Reveal thy face! that the whole world may be

Bewildered by thy radiant loveliness;

The cry of man and woman comes to thee,

Open thy lips and comfort their distress!
Each curling lock of thy luxuriant hair

Breaks into barbèd hooks to catch my heart,

My broken heart is wounded everywhere

With countless wounds from which the red drops start.

Yet when sad lovers meet and tell their sighs,

Not without praise shall Hafiz’ name be said,

Not without tears, in those pale companies

Where joy has been forgot and hope has fled.

—-

The Bird of Gardens
The bird of gardens sang unto the rose,

New blown in the clear dawn: “Bow down thy head!

As fair as thou within this garden close,

Many have bloomed and died.” She laughed and said

“That I am born to fade grieves not my heart

But never was it a true lover’s part

To vex with bitter words his love’s repose.”
The tavern step shall be thy hostelry,

For Love’s diviner breath comes but to those

That suppliant on the dusty threshold lie.

And thou, if thou would’st drink the wine that flows

From Life’s bejewelled goblet, ruby red,

Upon thine eyelashes thine eyes shall thread

A thousand tears for this temerity.
Last night when Irem’s magic garden slept,

Stirring the hyacinth’s purple tresses curled,

The wind of morning through the alleys stept.

“Where is thy cup, the mirror of the world?

Ah, where is Love, thou Throne of Djem?” I cried.

The breezes knew not; but “Alas,” they sighed,

“That happiness should sleep so long!” and wept.
Not on the lips of men Love’s secret lies,

Remote and unrevealed his dwelling-place.

Oh Saki, come! the idle laughter dies

When thou the feast with heavenly wine dost grace.

Patience and wisdom, Hafiz, in a sea

Of thine own tears are drowned; thy misery

They could not still nor hide from curious eyes.

—
The Days Of Spring
The days of Spring are here! the eglantine,

The rose, the tulip from the dust have risen–

And thou, why liest thou beneath the dust?

Like the full clouds of Spring, these eyes of mine

Shall scatter tears upon the grave thy prison,

Till thou too from the earth thine head shalt thrust.

—
True Love

True love has vanished from every heart;

What has befallen all lovers fair?

When did the bonds of friendship part?–

What has befallen the friends that were?

Ah, why are the feet of Khizr lingering?–

The waters of life are no longer clear,

The purple rose has turned pale with fear,

And what has befallen the wind of Spring?
None now sayeth: “A love was mine,

Loyal and wise, to dispel my care.”

None remembers love’s right divine;

What has befallen all lovers fair?

In the midst of the field, to the players’ feet,

The ball of God’s favour and mercy came,

But none has leapt forth to renew the game–

What has befallen the horsemen fleet?
Roses have bloomed, yet no bird rejoiced,

No vibrating throat has rung with the tale;

What can have silenced the hundred-voiced?

What has befallen the nightingale?

Heaven’s music is hushed, and the planets roll

In silence; has Zohra broken her lute?

There is none to press out the vine’s ripe fruit,

And what has befallen the foaming bowl?
A city where kings are but lovers crowned,

A land from the dust of which friendship springs–

Who has laid waste that enchanted ground?

What has befallen the city of kings?

Years have passed since a ruby was won

From the mine of manhood; they labour in vain,

The fleet-footed wind and the quickening rain,

And what has befallen the light of the sun?
Hafiz, the secret of God’s dread task

No man knoweth, in youth or prime

Or in wisest age; of whom would’st thou ask:

What has befallen the wheels of Time?

– Trans G. Bell (1897)

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Art Set To Music: Mark Kostabi

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Thanks For Visiting!

Once a soul has awakened to the continual music of life, that soul considers it as his responsibility, his duty, to play his part in the outer life, even if it be contrary to his inner condition at the moment.

– Hazrat Inayat Khan

This entry was originally based on these 3 videos: Allen Ginsberg With Paul McCartney “Ballad of The Skeletons” Allen Ginsberg in London-Ah Sunflower Allen Ginsberg – Father Death Blues… I had just watched “The Life And Times Of Allen Ginsberg”, and was hot on the old Allen track.
This is another large entry; I have broken my promise to put out something daily, something small. It seems I want to do the large thing, and if I had the time I would be doing this daily.
I am working on Dr. Con’s new book and setting up the next issue of “The Invisible College”, and trying to launch a new business. Bizzy Bizzy Bizzy. I have been selling off music equipment, Skulls and other items…
Rowan arrived back from out door school last night, and seems no worse for wear, though he did sleep 12 plus hours…
</aPeter’s 50th Birthday I want to note an important event in our part of the Multiverse. My Brother-In -Law Peter is turning 50 years old! (I am amazed how quickly he arrived there, until of course I look in the mirror and see that old guy looking back at me.) Wow. Time hurries on. Peter is perhaps one of the sweetest beings I have had the privilege to know in my time on this lovely green and blue globe… Not only is he a good guy, but a great dad, and one of those who puts his actions where his words are with his work for the environment, for the community and an advocate for life on all its various levels. He is one of the main supporters of Radio Free Earthrites, with generous donations of time and sound over the years. Peter I just have to say: “I love ya man. I do. We wish we could be there for the party. I want you to have a great time!”
That is it for this beautiful Saturday. I wish you all the best, and may love guide you in all things.
Blessings,

Gwyllm

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On The Menu:

The Links

Jocelyn Pook – Her Gentle Spirit

Sufi Aphorisms – Hazrat Inayat Khan

In An Eastern Rose Garden – Intuition – Hazrat Inayat Khan

Allen Ginsberg Videos

The Poetry Of The French Bohemians: Gerard De Nerval

Gerard De Nerval Biography

Jocelyn Pook – Masked Ball

Artist: Thomas Cole (Biography)

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The Links:

What If Marijuana Was De-Criminalized?

Libertarian Radio Host Tries A Little Waterboarding..

Did AI Cause The Financial Crisis?

The Taliban’s War On Sufism

Intelligent Life Sciences Search Engine…

The Illusion Of Sex

Were Mad Men Painting The Caves?

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Jocelyn Pook – Her Gentle Spirit

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Sufi Aphorisms of Hazrat Inayat Khan:
The limitless God cannot be made intelligible to the limited self unless He is first made limited. This limited ideal becomes like an instrument, a medium of God who is perfect and who is limitless.
Many do good, but how few do it wisely! To do good wisely is the work of the sage.
The one who lives in his mind is conscious of the mind; the one who lives in his soul is conscious of the soul.
Truth is unlimited and incomparable; therefore, truth alone knows, enjoys, and realizes its own existence.
The soul is light, the mind is light, and the body is light-light of different grades; and it is this relation which connects man with the planets and stars.
The infinite God is the self of God, and all that has manifested under name and form is the outer aspect of God.
Spirituality is attained by all beings; not only by man but by beasts and birds, for they each have their religion, their principles, their law, and their morals.
The pride that says, “I am so spiritual,” is not spiritual pride; it is earthly pride. For where there is spirituality there is no proud claim.
Spiritual realization can be attained in one moment in rare cases, but generally a considerable time of preparation is needed.
Fineness of nature is the sign of the intelligent. Fineness can be acquired by love of refinement.

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In An Eastern Rose Garden – Intuition

– Hazrat Inayat Khan

Intuition is a part of knowledge that is beyond man’s personality, and above his knowledge of things and names. It comes at times when man becomes passive and exposes himself to that knowledge, consciously or unconsciously.
There are some who are more intuitive, and there are others who are less so; and if we study the nature of their character, we shall know the nature of their intuition. Those who are confused, who are constantly hurried, who are changeable in their nature, who are afraid of death, of disease, of their own actions, of their enemies, of their surroundings; those who have constant doubt, wondering whether they can trust this person or that, whether a friend may or may not prove worthy, and so on it is all these who have less possibility of intuition. Those who can trust without troubling themselves, those who have few doubts, are usually cleared in their perception. Those who trust in the inner guidance, who understand the secret of the instinct that works through animals and all creatures, those who are pious, those who wish to walk in the light, who always prefer the right way of thinking and speaking and acting it is these who often experience intuition.
Intuition is the first step, inspiration is the second, and revelation is the third. When revelation begins, it has arisen from intuition; for intuition is the fist stage.
What is its way of manifestation? How is intuition expressed? Intuition is of two kinds: it may come without intention, without being invited, or it may come when one asks oneself a question. In the first kind a person may be sitting down, and the thought comes to him that a danger is awaiting him; in what way it may occur he does not know, he just feel it. Next day he finds that something was going to happen to him. Then he sometimes thinks that happiness is coming from a friend, that someone from whom he has been parted for a long time is coming to see him. Sometimes he thinks an enemy is going to turn into a friend; and yet he had not been thinking of the subject. The thought comes to him suddenly. It proves true, it proves right. Without inquiry a thought comes to us which tells us of a coming event. People sometimes take this to be a spirit-communication; sometimes they take it to be thought-transference from someone else. Both ideas are possible, but intuition is a greater and higher thing than spirit-communication or thought-reading, because it is pure; it is our won property; it belongs to us. In this we do not depend upon a spirit, or upon another person sending a thought to us. In this we are perfectly independent; we receive the

knowledge from within, which is far superior, greater, and higher.
The second kind of intuition is that of which it is said in the Bible, ‘Knock, and it shall be opened unto you.’ Knocking at the door is asking within one’s own self, ‘What will become of this particular business, or aim, or object that I am thinking of?’ As soon as one knocks at the gate of God, which is one’s heart, from there the answer comes, and it is a truer answer than any other person can give. There is no one who can know as much about our life, affairs, objects, motives as we do ourselves. And therefore nobody can advise us better than ourselves.
Mankind cannot understand this secret, and consequently begins by depending on the advice of others. This would be advantageous if one had the good fortune to find a better adviser. But sometimes the person from whom advice is asked is foolish, sometimes he is an enemy, sometimes he himself is in confusion and cannot advise. Therefore people keep themselves from their real and true adviser: the guiding faculty within.
Intuition begins in the form of impressions. As soon as we see a person we have an impression of him. His face, his features, his expression, his atmosphere have in a way made an impression on us of his goodness, his righteousness, his wisdom or foolishness, his being useful or not, his being displeased with us or not, his being our friend or enemy. Whatever his condition may be, we receive it without knowing from any other source that these are his feelings. According to our own openness of spirit we get our impressions. We may receive a kind of impression as to whether we will be successful in our business or not. All these impressions convey to a man that his intuition is beginning. That is the first step.
After having intuition about individuals in their relation to ourselves, the next step is the intuition which occurs when another person is telling us of his projects. We have an impression as to whether they will be successful or not. We cannot give a reason for it; or even if we do we become aware that as we utter the reason it is not the real reason. For as soon as we begin to think it out, we at once descend from the higher, the spiritual source of information. To try and prove the basic truth of its spiritual source by means of reason, is to use earthly means to establish that which belongs to heaven. A proper reason for an intuition cannot be given.
The source from which this knowledge comes is not reason. People who are very good at reasoning can go on fighting all their lives, and yet nothing may come of it. Ultimately their reasoning turns into a play on words and terms; and as a word can be made to mean anything, they have always an easy way of escape from being caught by the person with whom they argue. It is just like wrestling; or just as in a court of law two barristers will each present their case as being the truth even though they may in fact know that it is not true. They fight with their reason and logic.
First of all, it is necessary to realize that when we see that our impressions are right and our doubts cannot destroy them, and we have been right in ten impressions and wrong in only one, then we know that the wrong one was not what we thought it was. When this realization has evolved, then we are able to know things intuitively. The difference between imagination and

intuition is sometimes puzzling to define. Both come in the same way. When a certain imagination began to construct itself, we cannot say. The imagination came suddenly; but so also does intuition. That is why it is so difficult to discriminate between them. The truth is that if imagination comes with light, then it is certainly intuition. Every imagination is intuition until it has been corrupted by reason; and when the intuition is corrupted by reason it becomes imagination. But every imagination and every thought which is illumined by the intelligence is always an intuition; and therefore to an illuminated person any thought or imagination is intuition.
To him there is never a thought or imagination which is not an intuition.
But it is difficult to keep these from being corrupted by reason, because as soon as they are produced we doubt whether they are right or not right. We doubt it until we have killed all the truth of our intuition. Our doubts are always the enemies of our intuition; and therefore practice is required in everyday life to keep intuition from being corrupted and finally destroyed by our

doubts. We ought to build a fence round intuitions as if they were delicate plants, and protect them from being destroyed by reason and doubts. By doing so, in time we grow to be sure of our intuitions, and then we never fail to get things right. And when the intuitions become right then the dreams become right. We see what is really going to happen in every thought which

comes to us; the truth of life. Then our life becomes a miracle; there is no need to look for wonders in the outside world. Our own has become full of wonders. To the illuminated one every night’s dream becomes a book that tells the past, the present, and the future, both of himself and of all those whom he cares for or wishes to know about.
The next step is inspiration. Inspiration is not only the coming of a single thought, a single idea, but of a flow of ideas. One may express them in poetry, in music, in philosophy, in speech, in writing, in thinking. The inspirations come as many ideas. Inspiration is developed intuition. The expression of inspiration is according to one’s particular ability. If a person speaks a beautiful language, he can express his ideas in that language. All prophets and messengers have received the same message, but they have uttered it in different language. Why? Because surely it is one idea, one knowledge from heaven , but it is expressed according to the language the receiver is accustomed to, seeing that he has no other with which to express it.
The angels are not as great as man, because though they are gifted with the higher knowledge and are in the higher spheres, they have no power of expression. Man gets his knowledge from the higher source, but expresses it through the means provided by the lower spheres.
The Qur’an tells that God said to the angels, ‘I am going to create man, who will be the chief of creation.’ They asked, ‘Are we not a satisfactory army of servants who are always busy in Thy praise and admire Thy beauty and glorify Thy name? Why intendest Thou to create one who will do evil and shed blood, as he will do?’ The answer was, ‘Are you capable of appreciating all that I have made? Can you tell me what are the names of these things that I have made?’ God asks man; man tells Him all the names of things, the things that are sweet or bitter, then names of all manner of things; he knows and enjoys all these things in nature. That is why God says, ‘We have created him that he may be the chief of all creation, and enjoy all that We have created.’ Therefore those who think that the heavenly knowledge is sufficient are mystical; but the joy of the heavenly knowledge and the full understanding of it come from being able to express it in this world’s medium of expression. Therefore man can have knowledge both from within and from the external world. When the two come together, there is a perfect expression.
The last and most delicate degree of intuition is revelation. This comes to prophets and perfected beings. This is a full light thrown upon the human personality, full light from within. To their eyes, ears, sense of taste or touch, all things disclose their secret. Those who have received this knowledge even partly, have by receiving it come to understand the properties of this plant or that, to know that this bitter medicine is good for this purpose,, this sweet one for that, this drug or that vegetable for another. The knowledge of the property of the names and forms of the world is understood by them to the extent that revelation has helped them. When they look into the mind, they know all about the mind. When they study the earth, they come to know it. Whatever they try to know, they succeed in knowing; such is revelation. Those who look in the higher spheres are prophets, those who look on the earth are scientists, musicians, soldiers, and so on. It is from the direction in which he has studied that a man receives the revelation. In the higher spheres all things become clear to those who direct their attention to these spheres.
A man even sees his future in the teacup, with limited light; similarly he sees it in cards, in the crystal, in the coals of the fire, in smoke. All these things have the future written in them; it is the same light that shines upon them and begins to reveal itself in them. It is not only books, but all things in nature which begin to reveal the secrets of nature to him.
Sa’di says, ‘When the eyes open and begin to see with the divine light and divine sight, even the leaves of the trees become as the pages of the sacred Book.’

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Allen Ginsberg Videos:
Allen Ginsberg With Paul McCartney “Ballad of The Skeletons”

Allen Ginsberg in London-Ah Sunflower

Allen Ginsberg – Father Death Blues

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The Poetry Of The French Bohemians: Gerard De Nerval

An Old Tune
There is an air for which I would disown

Mozart’s, Rossini’s, Weber’s melodies, –

A sweet sad air that languishes and sighs,

And keeps its secret charm for me alone.
Whene’er I hear that music vague and old,

Two hundred years are mist that rolls away;

The thirteenth Louis reigns, and I behold

A green land golden in the dying day.
An old red castle, strong with stony towers,

The windows gay with many coloured glass;

Wide plains, and rivers flowing among flowers,

That bathe the castle basement as they pass.
In antique weed, with dark eyes and gold hair,

A lady looks forth from her window high;

It may be that I knew and found her fair,

In some forgotten life, long time gone by.

—
El Desdichado

(Translated as The Unhappy One) – Published in Les Chimerès (1854)
I am the shadowy — the widowed — sadly mute,

At ruined tower still the Prince of Aquitaine:

My single star is dead — my constellated lute

Now bears the sable sun of melancholy pain.
In darkness in my grave, you who once could cheer,

Return me Posilipo and the Italian sea,

The flower which was to my tormented heart so dear,

The trellis where the rose and vine entwined could be.
Am I Amor or Phoebus?…Lusignan or Biron?

My forehead is still red from that kiss by the queen;

That grotto where the siren swims, I’ve had my dream…
Two times the conquerer I’ve crossed the Acheron,

And on the lyre of Orpheus, changing from key to key,

I’ve sung both saintly sighs and sung the fairy’s lay.

—

Myrto

Published in Les Chimerès (1854)
It is of you, divine enchantress, I am thinking, Myrto,

Burning with a thousand fires at haughty Posilipo,

Of your forehead flowing with an Oriental glare,

Of the black grapes mixed with the gold of your hair.
From your cup also I drank to intoxication,

And from the furtive lightning of your smiling eyes,

While I was seen praying at the feet of Iacchus,

For the Muse has made me one of Greece’s sons.
Over there the volcano has re-opened, and I know

It is because yesterday you touched it with your nimble toe,

And suddenly the horizon was covered with ashes.
Since a Norman Duke shattered your gods of clay,

Evermore beneath the branches of Virgil’s laurel,

The pale hydrangea mingles with the green myrtle!

—
Fantasy

There is a melody for which I would surrender

All Rossini, all Mozart, all Weber,

An ancient, langorous, funereal tune,

With hidden charms for me alone.

And every time I hear that air,

Suddenly I grow two centuries younger,

I live in the reign of Louis the Thirteenth.

A green slope yellowed by the sunset,

Then a brick castle with stone corners,

Its panes of glass stained by ruddy colors,

Encircled by great parks, and a river

Bathing its feet, flowing between flowers.

Then I see a fair-haired, dark-eyed lady

In old-fashioned costume, at a tall window,

Whom perhaps I have already seen somewhere

In another life. .. and whom I remember!
Biography Of Gerard De Nerval
The French poet Gérard de Nerval (1808-1855) was an early romantic. His prose and poetry mark him as a precursor of the many movements, from symbolism to surrealism, that shaped modern French literature.
Gérard de Nerval was born Gérard Labrunie on May 22, 1808, in Paris. Because of his parents’ immediate departure for Silesia, where his mother died, Nerval was taken to the home of maternal relatives in the Valois. This region played a prominent part in many of his works. The fact that his early years were bereft of parental care probably contributed to his subsequent lack of mental equilibrium.
Upon his father’s return from the Napoleonic Wars in 1814, Nerval returned to Paris. As a day pupil at the Lycée Charlemagne, he distinguished himself by his precocious literary gifts and made the acquaintance of a lifelong friend, the poet Théophile Gautier.
Nerval’s translation in 1827 of J. W. von Goethe’s Faust (Part I) earned him the praise of Goethe and opened influential Parisian literary circles to him. His admiration for Victor Hugo converted him to the romantic movement. In the 1830s Nerval belonged to the petit cénacle, a group of minor artistic figures that gravitated around Gautier.
In 1834 Nerval received an inheritance from his maternal grandparents that enabled him to pursue exclusively the literary career of which his father disapproved. Nerval gave up his nominal study of medicine and made a brief trip to Italy, a tour that had a powerful and lasting effect on his imagination.
Meanwhile, Nerval fell in love with Jenny Colon, an actress, for whom he founded a theatrical review, Le Monde dramatique. It failed after 2 years. The brilliant and gay life that Nerval led during this brief period of prosperity was succeeded by a lifetime of financial difficulties and personal sadness. The poet lost both his small patrimony and Jenny Colon, who married another. During this period Nerval centered his main literary efforts on the theater, a genre basically uncongenial to his talents. In spite of an occasional success, such as Piquillo (1837), his efforts in the theater generally met with failure.
The years 1839-1841 were ones of growing eccentricities and depression for Nerval. His translation of Faust (Part II), which appeared in 1840, culminated in a mental breakdown that caused him to be hospitalized in 1841. His mental stability thus shattered, Nerval’s life became more precarious and difficult because he depended upon his pen for his living. In order to mend his health, Nerval made a trip to the Orient in 1843. His health regained, he published articles dealing with his travels in serial form in various periodicals. During these years of remission from mental breakdown, he also published chronicles, essays, poems, and novellas in many magazines, all the time trying unsuccessfully to establish himself in the theater. He also traveled in foreign countries and in the Valois. Wandering had become a temperamental necessity, and it is an important theme in his major works.
In 1848 Nerval published his translation of Heinrich Heine’s poetry. In 1851 Le Voyage en Orient appeared. Under the guise of a travelog, it concerned itself with the pilgrimage of a soul, being more revealing of the inner geography of Nerval than of Egypt, Lebanon, or Turkey.
Nerval’s major works were all written in the last few years of his life under the threat of incurable insanity. A serious relapse in 1851 marked him irrevocably. In 1852 he published Les Illuminés, a series of biographical sketches of unorthodox and original figures. In 1853 Les Petits châteaux de Bohême appeared. It was a nostalgic recounting of his happy years. It also contained the Odelettes, early poems in the manner of Pierre de Ronsard. Nerval then published his best and most famous story, Sylvie, in the Revue des deux mondes. In this tale he explored the sources of memory and transfigured the Valois of his childhood. It was included in Les Filles du feu in 1854. That same year Les Chimères, a series of 12 hermetic sonnets, also appeared.
During this period Nerval was also writing an autobiographical work, Les Nuits d’Octobre, and Aurélia, his last and most occult work. In Aurélia Nerval described the experience of madness and his attempt to overcome it by means of the written word.
In January 1855, destitute and desperate, Nerval committed suicide by hanging himself in a Parisian alley.

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Jocelyn Pook – Masked Ball

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Thomas Cole Biography:
The nineteenth century saw the development of a type of painting which came to be called the “Hudson River School.” One of the founders and greatest painters in the Hudson River School was Thomas Cole.
Thomas Cole was born in Bolton-le-Moors, Lancashire, England in 1801. His family immigrated to America when he was 17. Cole probably learned the basics of oil painting from an itinerant portrait artist named John Stein, and in addition spent two years at the Pennsylvania School of Fine Arts. He first exhibited in New York, where painter Asher B. Durand and Colonel John Trumbull saw his work and found patrons for him.
In the nineteenth century there were several ways artists sold their work. Some artists worked on commission, in which case a person, called a patron, would hire them to paint a certain scene or portrait. These patrons often provided money for artists to travel, particularly in Italy, Greece or France. European travel was considered essential to an artist’s development and training. In addition, artists could make work that was not specifically commissioned, and put that work in shows or galleries where people would see the work, and possibly purchase it. After purchasing several of Cole’s paintings from the gallery where he was exhibiting, George W. Bruen paid for Cole’s first trip up the Hudson River, the area he and other painters would return to so frequently in their work that they became known as the Hudson River School.
The Hudson River School consisted of a group of artists that painted romantic landscapes of the northeast portion of the United States, particularly around the Hudson River area. Cole is considered a founder of this group and the style of landscape painting the Hudson River School artists were famous for. Cole painted American landscapes, and argued for the unique place American scenery had in the world.
In the nineteenth century America was searching for an identity. A young, untested nation, an “experiment in democracy,” it needed a way to show the world its uniqueness and value. One way Americans could assert the validity and power of their nation was through paintings that argued for America’s unique scenery. Cole’s powerful landscapes showed aspects of America such as mountains, forests, and waterfalls that did not exist in the same form in Europe.
In his “Essay on American Scenery” Cole praises the value of landscape itself, extolling the spirituality inherent in the beauty of scenery. Nature was inseparable from religion, according to Cole. He himself was active in the Episcopal Church. Cole was married in St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Catskill, in 1836. Cole married Maria Bartow, the niece of John Alexander from whom Cole rented a summer studio in 1834. Both Cole and his wife were baptized at St. Luke’s several years into their marriage. He was also the primary architect in the rebuilding of St. Luke’s after it was destroyed by fire, and a delegate to an Episcopal convention in New York.
Cole criticized the march of modern society, accusing people of losing their regard for “simplicity and beauty.” In his “Essay on American Scenery” Cole states, “the spirit of our society is to contrive but not to enjoy–toiling to produce more toil–accumulating in order to aggrandize.” It is not surprising that much of Cole’s work celebrates nature, and often has a theme of the underlying power of the natural world.
When people appear in Cole’s paintings they are dwarfed by the immensity of nature. Some of Cole’s most famous and renown works include the paintings in the series entitled “The Course of Empire,” which shows the rise and fall of a civilization. The last painting in this series is an image of trees and plants springing up around the ruins of the fallen empire–nature reclaiming the landscape.
Thomas Cole died in 1848 in Catskill, New York after several months of poor health. He contributed a unique way of showing American scenery. He provided a large body of work arguing for the value of landscape, specifically in the United States. After his death he was memorialized in a painting by Asher Durand and continues to be remembered by painters and lovers of American art.

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On The Music Box: Hydrogen Jukebox: Philip Glass &amp; Allen Ginsberg
“Anarchism does not mean bloodshed; it does not mean robbery, arson, etc. These monstrosities are, on the contrary, the characteristic features of capitalism. Anarchism means peace and tranquility to all.”

–August Spies, Haymarket anarchist

Just watched the film: The Life And Times Of Allen Ginsberg. It is a keeper. I was amazed watching him read Kaddish, at the depths of emotion that he brought to it. It is in the face, combined with the voice. A life is etched into those words, the life of his mother Naomi, mad and gone. After she died, Allen received a letter from Naomi written just days before died. “I have found the key, it is in the sunshine. I have found the key, it is in the air”.
I was truly moved by the film, and the thumbnail sketch it gave to Ginsberg’s life and loves. I would suggest it to anyone.
Three Political Wonders:
Has anyone been watching the spectacle of Richard Cheney lately? It will end up with a heart attack or worse. It is watching a maddening spiral of justification that so far no one is buying and few seem to care about. I don’t think Richard is exactly sleeping well as of late.
Another anomaly I have been watching is Michael Savage, and his adventures with the British Gov’t. not allowing him to visit the UK. He has appealed to Hilary Clinton to intercede for him. This is a wonder, after all the horrible things he said against her over the years, and her family…. Still something might give, and Hilary will be gracious and intercede.
Did anyone pick up on the new “Drug Czar” Gil Kerlikowske saying: “Regardless of how you try to explain to people it’s a ‘war on drugs’ or a ‘war on a product,’ people see a war as a war on them,” he said. “We’re not at war with people in this country.” I am not holding my breath (well maybe I am because my head is spinning)… What does this mean for the hundreds of thousands in prison at the present time?
Well, I hope life is sweet for you in these early days of summer. Slightly confused, bemused and misused in Portland… 80)
Yours In Poesy,

Gwyllm

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On The Menu:

Anarchy Quotes

Arabesque- Germaine Tailleferre

The Great Marijuana Hoax – Allen Ginsberg

Nocturne – Germaine Tailleferre
Flags Snapping In the May Wind… Part 2

The Colours Of Mystery – George Auric

Hashish Poems

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Anarchy Quotes:

“If we have to use force, it is because we are America.” –Secretary of State Madeleine Albright
“We are going to inherit the earth . There is not the slightest doubt about that. The bourgeoisie may blast and burn its own world before it finally leaves the stage of history. We Are not afraid of ruins. We who ploughed the prairies and built the cities can build again, only better next time. We carry a new world, here in our hearts. That world is growing this minute.” —-Durruti
You can’t mine coal without machine guns. –Richard B. Mellon, Congressional testimony quoted in Time, June 14, 1937
“The only means of strengthening one’s intellect is to make up one’s mind about nothing – to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts. ” – John Keats
“‘What I believe’ is a process rather than a finality. Finalities are for gods and governments, not for the human intellect.” – Emma Goldman
“The essence of all slavery consists in taking the product of another’s labor by force. It is immaterial whether this force be founded upon ownership of the slave or ownership of the money that he must get to live” -Leo Tolstoy
“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

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Arabesque- Germaine Tailleferre

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The Great Marijuana Hoax – Allen Ginsberg

How much to be revealed about marijuana especially in this time and nation for the general public! for the actual experience of the smoked herb has been completely clouded by a fog of dirty language by the diminishing crowd of fakers who have not had the experience and yet insist on being centers of propaganda about the experience. And the key, the paradoxical key to this bizarre impasse of awareness is precisely that the marijuana consciousness is one that, ever so gently, shifts the center of attention from habitual shallow purely verbal guidelines and repetitive secondhand ideological interpretations of experience to more direct, slower, absorbing, occasionally microscopically minute engagement with sensing phenomena during the high moments or hours after one has smoked.
One who has the experience needs no explanations in the world of explanatory language, which is, after all, a limited charming part of the whole phenomenal show of life. A few people don’t like the experience and report back to the language world that it’s a drag and make propaganda against this particular area of nonverbal awareness. But the vast majority all over the world, who have smoked the several breaths necessary to feel the effect, adjust to the strangely familiar sensation of time slow-down, and explore this new space thru natural curiosity, report that it’s a useful area of mind-consciousness to be familiar with, a creative show of the silly side of an awful big army of senseless but habitual thought-formations risen out of the elements of a language world: a metaphysical herb less habituating than tobacco, whose smoke is no more disruptive than insight — in short, for those who have made the only objective test, a vast majority of satisfied smokers.
This essay in explanation, conceived by a mature middle-aged gentleman, the holder at present of a Guggenheim Fellowship for creative writing, a traveler on many continents with experience of customs and modes of different cultures, is dedicated in the author’s right mind (i.e., not high) to those who have not smoked marijuana, as an attempt to bridge the conceptual gap, or cultural gap as may be, to explain the misunderstanding that has too long existed between those who know what pot is by experience and those who don’t know exactly what it is but have been influenced by sloppy, or secondhand, or unscientific, or (as in the case of drug-control bureaucracies) definitely self-interested language used to describe the marijuana high pejoratively. I offer the pleasant suggestion that a negative approach to the whole issue (as presently pertains to what are aptly called “square” circles in the USA) is not necessarily the best, and that it is time to shift to a more positive attitude toward this specific experience1. If one is not inclined to have the experience oneself, this is a free country and no one is obliged to have an experience merely because a great number of one’s friends, family, or business acquaintances have had it and report themselves pleased. On the other hand, an equal respect and courtesy is required for the sensibilities of one’s familiars for whom the experience has not been closed off by the door of choice.
The main negative mythic images of the marijuana state that the general public is familiar with emanate from one particular source: the U.S. Treasury Department Narcotics Bureau.2 If the tendency (a return to common sense) to leave the opiate problem with qualified MD’s prevails, the main function of this large bureau will shift to the persecution of marijuana. Otherwise, the bureau will have no function except as a minor tax office for which it was originally purposed, under the aegis of Secretary of the Treasury. Following Parkinson’s Law that a bureaucracy will attempt to find work for itself, or following a simpler line of thought, that the agents of this bureau have a business interest in perpetuating the idea of a marijuana “menace” lest they lose their employment, it is not unreasonable to suppose that a great deal of the violence, hysteria and energy of the anti-marijuana language propaganda emanating from this source has as its motive a rather obnoxious self-interest, all the more objectionable for its tone of moralistic evangelism.3 This hypocrisy is recognizable to anybody who has firsthand experience of the so-called narcotic; which, as the reader may have noticed, I have termed an herb, which it is — a leaf or blossom — in order to switch away from negative terminology and inaccurate language. A marvelous project for a sociologist, and one which I am sure will be in preparation before my generation grows old, will be a close examination of the actual history and tactics of the Narcotics Bureau and its former chief power, Harry J. Anslinger, in planting the seed of the marijuana “menace” in the public mind and carefully nurturing its growth in the course of a few decades until the unsuspecting public was forced to accept an outright lie.4 I am not a thorough patient sociologist and this is not my task here, so I will limit myself to telling a few stories from personal experience, or relating stories that have been told me.
I must begin by explaining something that I have already said in public for many years: that I occasionally use marijuana in preference to alcohol, and have for several decades. I say occasionally and mean it quite literally; I have spent about as many hours high as I have spent in movie theaters — sometimes 3 hours a week, sometimes 12 or 20 or more, as at a film festival — with about the same degree of alteration of my normal awareness.
To continue, I therefore do know the subjective possibilities of marijuana and therein take evidence of my own senses between my own awareness of the mysterious ghastly universe of joy, pain, discovery, birth and death, the emptiness and awesomeness of its forms and consciousness described in the Prajnaparamita Sutra central to a Buddhist or even Christian or Hindu view of Kosmos which I sometimes experience while high, as for the last two paragraphs, and the cheap abstract inexperienced version of exactly the same thing one may have read in the newspapers, written by reporters (who smoke pot themselves occasionally nowadays) taking the main part of their poorly written squibs of misinformation from the texts and mouths of Chiefs of Narcotics Bureaus, Municipal or Federal — or an occasional doctor notorious for his ungracious stupidity and insulting manners.
One doctor, facing me across a microphone in a radio broadcasting booth on a six o’clock chat show, pre-recorded, opened our conversation reading aloud a paragraph of Kaddish (a poem I had written in memory of my mother, and a tribute to her which made my own father weep; a text widely read, set to music or anthologized in portions, translations of which had met with some critical approval in various languages — Spanish, French, Italian and German, by now some Bengali or Hebrew; a text which I submitted as among my major poems in applying for monies from great foundations; a text applauded in recitation before academies; a text recorded for a large commercial business establishment’s circulation; a text which I’d spent months daily transcribing as a movie scenario — in short a straightforward piece of communication integrating the subjective and objective, private and public, and what is common between them) — disapproving and confused — declared firmly that the dashes used as this — indicated that the broken measures of phrase — moment-to-moment consciousness during which syntax and meaning and direction of the — pauses for thought — were a sign of marijuana intoxication and were incomprehensible. He could not follow the thought. He s
aid, as I remember — marijuana retains associations and goes from one thought to another if verbalized — that I was, in fact, quite mad.
Such a notion I thought quite mad on his part; my mother had been that. They were both quite insistent in their obsessions, or opinions, and sometimes harsh and premature in their judgments. This doctor and my mother did not differ so much from myself; the announcer was sympathetic to both of us. After the show I got quite angry with the doctor — it seemed quite a self-righteous remark; but I suppose I could not match his Power by any other means at the moment and felt that frankness and a show of emotion might shake his composure — alas, I yelled Fascist in his face, and had to be reprimanded by my companion Mr. Orlovsky for losing my temper with the doctor. I have a most excellent reason in such cases and so calmed myself, but I did believe that he was a quack-mind of sorts and a sort of negative judger with professional credentials. I had as friends many psychiatrists who treated me as interesting and no madder than themselves; and had in fact graduated from 8 months in a psychiatric institute to be told smilingly by a doctor that I was not schizophrenic but in fact a bearable neurotic, like many other people — but this was years earlier when I was a poet with a tie and an obsession with eternity. True, I had changed much in the intervening 13 years, I had pursued my thoughts to India and was now satisfied with my self and bodily existence, and a little more in harmony with desire for life, I had begun singing mantras daily — Hindu practice of japa and kirtan — and I had smoked a lot of marijuana in those years; but I had not, despite my odd little biography in Who’s Who, maintained so much confusion over my identity as to forget to end a sentence, if I wished to, tying together simultaneous association and language and memory with correct punctuation and obvious thought for the reader (to make it obvious, I am doing it now): I had not so much changed and broken away from communication from my fellow selves on earth that anyone should judge me mad. His remark (on the radio) only made me feel slightly paranoid; and I suppose it is no cure to try to make the other fellow feel paranoid, so perhaps I misunderstood the doctor and must take a charitable position and assume that I am Mad (or Not-Mad) but that the doctor also misunderstood my syntax; and judged too abruptly before the revelations possible thru pot had been deciphered … In any case I had not been high on marijuana when Kaddish was composed. The original mss. were bought by New York University library and are clearly labeled as written primarily under the influence of amphe*amines, familiar to many a truck driver, doctor, student, housewife, and harried business executive and soldier in battle — a common experience not generally termed mad.
The mind does wander and that’s another way around; to give by example a manifestation of the precise record of the effects of marijuana during composition on the subject itself, showing the area of reality traversed, so that the reader may see that it is a harmless gentle shift to a “more direct, slower, absorbing, occasionally microscopically minute, engagement with sensing phenomena” — in this case the phenomenon of transmuting to written language a model of the marijuana experience, which can be understood and related to in some mode by those who have not yet met the experience but who are willing to slow their thought and judgment and decipher the syntax clause by clause; not necessarily as slowly as composed, so the affect will differ; and of course two bodies cannot, they say, occupy the same place in space. Yet in another light, they say we are one being of thought and to that common being — perceived in whatever mode one perceives — I address this syntax.5
Returning to the mundane world of order6, may I compare the mental phenomena of the preceding anecdote with the criminal view of it as presented by the Narcotics Department for years in cheap sex magazines and government reports — reports uninfluenced by the Narco Department take a contrasting view7 — base paranoia close to murder, frothing at the mouth of Egyptian dogs, sex orgies in cheap dives, debilitation and terror and physiological or mysterious psychic addiction. An essentially grotesque image, a thought-hallucination magnified myriad thru mass media, a by-product of fear — something quite fiendish — “Dope Fiend,” the old language, a language abandoned in the early sixties when enough of the general public had sufficient personal experience to reject such palpable poppycock and the bureaucratic line shifted to defense of its own existence with the following reason:8 necessary to control marijuana because smoking leads to search for thrill kicks; this leads to next step, the monster her*in. And a terrible fate.9
In sound good health I smoked legal ganja (as marijuana is termed in India where it is traditionally used in preference to alcohol), bought from government tax shops in Calcutta, in a circle of devotees, yogis, and hymn-singing pious Shivaist worshippers in the burning ground at Nimtallah ghat in Calcutta, where it was the custom of these respected gentlemen to meet on Tuesday and Saturday nights, smoke before an improvised altar of blossoms, sacramental milk-candy and perhaps a fire taken from the burning wooden bed on which lay a newly dead body, of some friend perhaps, likely a stranger if a corpse is a stranger, pass out the candy as God’s gift to friend and stranger, and sing holy songs all night, with great strength and emotion, addressed to different images of the Divine Spirit. Ganja was there considered a beginning of sadhana10 by some; others consider the ascetic yogi Shiva himself to have smoked marijuana; on His birthday marijuana is mixed as a paste with almond milk by the grandmothers of pious families and imbibed as sacrament by this polytheistic nation, considered by some a holy society. The professors of English at Benares University brought me a bottle for the traditional night of Shivaratri, birthday of the Creator and Destroyer who is the patron god of this oldest continuously inhabited city on earth. Bom Bom Mahadev!” (Boom Boom Great God!) is the mantra yogis’ cry as they raise the ganja pipe to their brows before inhaling.
All India is familiar with ganja, and so is all Africa, and so is all the Arab world; and so were Paris and London in smaller measure in high-minded but respectable 19th-century circles; and so on a larger scale is America even now. Young and old, millions perhaps smoke marijuana and see no harm. And we have not measured the Latin-American world, Mexico particularly, who gave the local herb its familiar name. In some respects we may then see its prohibition as an arbitrary cultural taboo.
There has been a tendency toward its suppression in the Arab world with the too hasty adoption of Western rationality and the enlarged activity of the American fanatic Mr. Anslinger as US representative to the UN World Health Organization Single Narcotics Commission — a position from which he circulates hysterical notices and warnings, manufactured in Washington’s Treasury Department, to the police forces of the cities of the world — so I was told by a police official in Tel Aviv, an old school chum who laughed about the latest release, a grim warning against the dangers of khat, a traditional energizing leaf chewed by Bedouins of Arabia and businessmen and princes in Ethiopia, as well as a few traditional Yemenite Jews.
There seems to be a liaison between Anslinger and some policemen in Egypt, which has now formally outlawed its hashish or kif form of marijuana (even though masses of non drinking faithful Muslims prefer a contemplative pipe of kif to the dangers of violent alcohol forbidden by the Koran). We find government bureaucrats with the well-to-do (as in India) taking knowing delight in alcohol a
s a more sophisticated and daring preference; and stories of mad dogs frothing at the mouth and asylums full of people driven mad by some unheard-of brand of hashish (would god it were imported to America like some fine brand of Scotch or pernod) circulated from the police information bureaus of Egypt — or perhaps some single cranky Egyptian Dr. Baird — thru the Treasury Department Narcotics Bureau and thence by interview and press release to the mass media of America and an inexperienced public (encouraged to drink intoxicating beer by millions of dollars’ worth of advertisement). The Egyptian evidence has been quoted for years, most recently by the present head of the Narcotics Bureau, a Mr. Giordano, one of Mr. Anslinger’s former intimates in the department.
Professor Lindesmith has already objected in public print to the Department’s manipulation and attempted quashing of various medical-juridical reports; a Canadian documentary film on the drug subject has been blocked from being shown in this country thru activity of the Treasury Department — perhaps an import license was refused; the impartial LaGuardia Report was rudely attacked by Anslinger; a President’s Judicial Advisory Council Policy Statement (1964) has characterized the activities of the Bureau as exceeding legal rightfulness in “criminalizing” by executive fiat and administrative dictum those addicted to addicting drugs who for decades have been prevented from going to a doctor for treatment unless it was under the aegis of Lexington jail and thru police channels. Memory of the British East India Hemp Commission report, the largest in history, done in the 1880s, which concluded that marijuana was not a problem, has been ignored,11 memories of our own Panama Canal military reports giving marijuana a clean bill of health have been unavailing in consideration of the Bureau,12 doctors have complained of being harassed and framed by one or another police agency; sick junkies have died in jail; thousands of intelligent citizens have been put in prison for uncounted years for possession or sale of marijuana,13 even if they grew it themselves and only smoked in private; youths have been entrapped into selling small or large quantities of grass to police agents and consequently found themselves faced with all the venomous bullshit that an arbitrary law can create from the terrors of arrest to the horror of years in jail; the author receives letters of complaint and appeals for help from many US cities, from acquaintances, fellow litterateurs, even scholarly investigators of the subject writing books about it, as well as from one energetic poet founding a fine project for an Artist’s Workshop (John Sinclair in Detroit, sentenced to 6 months for letting an agent buy marijuana for the second time) — one becomes awed by the enormity of the imposition.14
It is not a healthy activity for the State to be annoying so many of its citizens thusly; it creates a climate of topsy-turvy law and begets disrespect for the law and the society that tolerates execution of such barbarous law,15 and a climate of fear and hatred for the administrators of the law. Such a law is a threat to the existence of the State itself, for it sickens and debilitates its most adventurous and sensitive citizens. Such a law, in fact, can drive people mad.
It is no wonder then that most people who have smoked marijuana in America often experience a state of anxiety, of threat, of paranoia in fact, which may lead to trembling or hysteria, at the microscopic awareness that they are breaking a law, that thousands of investigators all over the country are trained and paid to smoke them out and jail them, that thousands of their community are in jail, that inevitably a few friends are “busted” with all the hypocrisy and expense and anxiety of that trial and perhaps punishment — jail and victimage by the bureaucracy that made, propagandized, administers, and profits from such a monstrous law.
From my own experience and the experience of others I have concluded that most of the horrific affects and disorders described as characteristic of marijuana “intoxication” by the US Federal Treasury Department’s Bureau of Narcotics are, quite the reverse, precisely traceable back to the effects on consciousness not of the narcotic but of the law and the threatening activities of the US Bureau of Narcotics itself. Thus, as the Buddha said to a lady who offered him a curse, the gift is returned to the giver when it is not accepted.
I myself experience this form of paranoia when I smoke marijuana, and for that reason smoke it in America more rarely than I did in countries where it is legal. I noticed a profound difference of affect in my case. The anxiety was directly traceable to fear of being apprehended and treated as a deviant criminal and put thru the hassle of social disapproval, ignominious Kafkian tremblings in vast court buildings coming to be judged, the helplessness of being overwhelmed by force or threat of deadly force and put in brick and iron cell.
This apprehension deepened when on returning this year from Europe I was stopped, stripped, and searched at customs. The dust of my pockets was examined with magnifying glass for traces of weed. I had publicly spoken in defense of marijuana and attacked the conduct of the Bureau, and now my name was down on a letter dossier at which I secretly peeked, on the customs search-room desk. I quote the first sentence, referring to myself and Orlovsky: “These persons are reported to be smuggling (or importing) narcotics…”
On a later occasion, when I was advised by several friends and near- acquaintances that Federal Narcotics personnel in New York City had asked them to “set me up” for an arrest, I became incensed enough to write a letter of complaint to my Congressman. He replied that he thought I was being humorless about the reason for my being on a list for customs investigation, since it was natural (I had talked about the dread subject so much in public); anyway, not Kafkian as I characterized it. As for my complaint about being set up — that, with my letter, was forwarded to the Treasury Department in Washington for consideration and reply.16 I had schemed writing some essay such as this in addition to a letter of reminder to my Representative, for it would be to my safety to publish.
I had had the earlier experience after a nationwide TV discussion show, during which the moderator, John Crosby, the anthropologist Ashley Montagu, and celebrated fellow-writer Norman Mailer all concluded — perhaps for the first time over a nationally publicized medium of communication in the last three decades — that as far as we knew there was nothing wrong with marijuana — of learning that the Treasury Department, true to its obsession, had forced its opinion back on the medium thru a seven-minute video-taped refutation (including an incredible rehash of the Egyptian mad dogs), and placed it on the air against the wishes of Mr. Crosby on the insistence of his network, which had received a communication from the Narco Bureau, possibly thru intervention of FCC. Years later I read an account of the incident by Mr. Crosby in his syndicated column, formally complaining about the affair.17
At that time, looking forward to the occasion of this essay, a difficult one, I made a preliminary epistle on the subject to Anslinger himself, a ten-page composition saying I thought he was a dangerous fraud, responsible for untold death and suffering, and that some day soon, those who had experience of the matter would band together with reasoning and documentation — such as one may find in this book — to come out in the open to explain the actual horror of the US Treasury Department Federal Narcotic Bureau to an already suspecting public.
Allen Ginsberg 2 A.M. Nov. 14, 1965
II
Rather than alter the preceding composition — let it remain, for the reader who has not smoked marijuana, a
manifestation of marijuana-high thought structure in a mode which intersects our mutual consciousness, namely language — the author wishes to add here a few thoughts.
The author has spent half a year in Morocco, smoking kif often: old gentlemen and peaceable youths sit amiably, in cafés or under shade trees in outdoor gardens drinking mint tea, passing the tiny kif pipe, and looking quietly at the sea. This is the true picture of the use of kif in North Africa, exactly the opposite of the lurid stereotype of mad-dog human beings deliberately spread by our Treasury Department police branch. And I set this model of tranquil sensibility beside the tableau of aggravated New York executives sipping whiskey before a 1966 TV set’s imagery of drunken American violence covering the world from the highways to Berkeley all the way to the dirt roads of Vietnam.
No one has yet remarked that the suppression of Negro rights, culture, and sensibility in America has been complicated by the marijuana laws. African sects have used pot for divine worship (much as I have described its sacred use in India). And to the extent that jazz has been an adaptation of an African religious form to American context (and will have been in no small measure the salvation of America, if America survives the decades of coming change), marijuana has been closely associated with the development of this indigenous American form of chant and prayer. Use of marijuana has always been widespread among the Negro population in this country, and suppression of its use, with constant friction and bludgeoning of the law, has been one of the major unconscious, or unmentionable, methods of suppression of Negro rights. The mortal sufferings of our most celebrated heroic Negro musicians, from Billie Holiday thru Thelonious Monk, at the hands of police over the drug issue are well known. Such sadistic persecutions have outraged the heart of America for decades. I mean the cultural and spiritual heart — US music.
Although most scientific authors who present their reputable evidence for the harmlessness of marijuana make no claim for its surprising usefulness, I do make that claim:
Marijuana is a useful catalyst for specific optical and aural aesthetic perceptions. I apprehended the structure of certain pieces of jazz and classical music in a new manner under the influence of marijuana, and these apprehensions have remained valid in years of normal consciousness. I first discovered how to see Klee’s Magic Squares as the painter intended them (as optically 3-dimensional space structures) while high on marijuana. I perceived (“dug”) for the first time Cézanne’s “petit sensation” of space achieved on a 2-dimensional canvas (by means of advancing and receding colors, organization of triangles, cubes, etc. as the painter describes in his letters) while looking at The Bathers high on marijuana. And I saw anew many of nature’s panoramas and landscapes that I’d stared at blindly without even noticing before; thru the use of marijuana, awe and detail were made conscious. These perceptions are permanent — any deep aesthetic experience leaves a trace, and an idea of what to look for that can be checked back later. I developed a taste for Crivelli’s symmetry; and saw Rembrandt’s Polish Rider as a sublime youth on a deathly horse for the first time — saw myself in the rider’s face, one might say — while walking around the Frick Museum high on pot. These are not “hallucinations”; these are deepened perceptions that one might have catalyzed not by pot but by some other natural event (as natural as pot) that changes the mind, such as an intense love, a death in the family, a sudden clear dusk after rain, or the sight of the neon spectral reality of Times Square one sometimes has after leaving a strange movie. So it’s all natural.
At this point it should be announced that most of the major (best and most famous too) poets, painters, musicians, cinéasts, sculptors, actors, singers and publishers in America and England have been smoking marijuana for years and years. I have gotten high with the majority of the dozens of contributors to the Don Allen Anthology of New American Poetry 1945-1960; and in years subsequent to its publication have sat down to coffee and a marijuana cigarette with not a few of the more academic poets of the rival Hall-Pack-Simpson anthology. No art opening in Paris, London, New York, or Wichita at which one may not sniff the incense-fumes of marijuana issuing from the ladies’ room. Up and down Madison Avenue it is charming old inside knowledge; in the clacketing vast city rooms of newspapers on both coasts, copyboys and reporters smoke somewhat less marijuana than they take tranquilizers or Benzedrine, but pot begins to rival liquor as a non-medicinal delight in conversation. Already 8 years ago I smoked marijuana with a couple of narcotic department plainclothesmen who were trustworthy enough to invite to a literary reception. A full-page paid advertisement in The New York Times, quoting authoritative medical evidence of the harmlessness of marijuana, and signed by a thousand of its most famous smokers, would once and for all break the cultural ice and end once and for all the tyranny of the Treasury Department Narcotics Bureau. For it would only manifest in public what everybody sane in the centers of communication in America knows anyway, an enormous open secret — that it is time to end Prohibition again. And with it put an end to the gangsterism, police mania, hypocrisy, anxiety, and national stupidity generated by administrative abuse of the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937.
It should be understood once and for all that in this area we have been undergoing police-state conditions in America, with characteristic mass brainwashing of the public, persecution and deaths in jails, elaborate systems of plainclothes police and police spies and stool pigeons, abuse of constitutional guarantees of privacy of home and person (even mode of consciousness) from improper search and seizure. The police prohibition of marijuana (accompanied with the even more obnoxious persecution of sick heroin addicts who all along should have been seeing the doctor) has directly created vast black markets, crime syndicates, crime waves in the cities, and a breakdown of law and order in the State itself. For the courts of large cities are clogged with so-called narcotic crimes and behind schedule, and new laws (such as the recent NY Rockefeller Stop and Frisk and No-Knock) spring up against the citizen to cope with the massive unpopularity of prohibition.
Not only do I propose end of prohibition of marijuana, and total shift of treatment of actually addictive drugs to the hands of the medical profession, but I propose a total dismantling of the whole cancerous bureaucracy that has perpetrated this historic fuck-up on the United States. And not only is it necessary that the Bureau of Narcotics be dismantled and consigned to the wax-museum of history, where it belongs, but it is also about time that a full-scale Congressional investigation, utilizing all the resources of the embattled medical, legal and sociological authorities, who for years have been complaining in vain, should be undertaken to fix the precise responsibility for this vast swindle on the administrative, business and mass-media shoulders where it belongs. What was the motive and method in perpetrating this insane hoax on public consciousness? Have any laws of malfeasance in public office been violated?
Not only an investigation of how it all happened but some positive remuneration is required for those poor citizens, many of them defenseless against beatings, sickness, and anxiety for years — a minority directly and physically persecuted by the police of every city and state and by agents of the nation; a minority often railroaded to jail by uncomprehending judges for months, for years, for decades; a minority battling idiotic laws, and even then without adequate legal
representation for the slim trickery available to the rich to evade such laws. Pension must be made obviously for the cornered junkies. But for the inoffensive charming smokers of marijuana who have undergone disgraceful jailings, money is due as compensation. This goes back decades for thousands and thousands of people who, I would guess, are among the most sensitive citizens of the nation; and their social place and special honor of character should be rewarded by a society which urgently needs this kind of sensibility where it can be seen in public.
I have long felt that there were certain political implications to the suppression of marijuana, beyond the obvious revelation (which Burroughs pointed out in Naked Lunch) of the cancerous nature of the marijuana-suppression bureaucracy. When the citizens of this country see that such an old-time, taken-for-granted, flag-waving, reactionary truism of police, press, and law as the “reefer menace” is in fact a creepy hoax, a scarecrow, a national hallucination emanating from the perverted brain of one single man (perhaps) such as Anslinger, what will they begin to think of the whole of taken-for-granted public REALITY?
What of other issues filled with the same threatening hysteria? The spectre of Communism? Respect for the police and courts? Respect for the Treasury Department? If marijuana is a hoax, what is Money? What is the War in Vietnam? What are the Mass Media?
As I declared at the beginning of this essay, marijuana consciousness shifts attention from stereotyped verbal symbols to “more direct, slower, absorbing, occasionally microscopically minute engagement with sensing phenomena during the high …” Already millions of people have got high and looked at the images of their Presidents and governors and representatives on television and seen that all were betraying signs of false character. Or heard the impersonal robot tones of radio newscasters announcing mass deaths in Asia.
It is no wonder that for years the great centers of Puritanism of consciousness, blackout and persecution of the subtle vibrations of personal consciousness catalyzed by marijuana have been precisely Moscow and Washington, the centers of the human power war. Fanatical rigid mentality pursuing abstract ideological obsessions make decisions in the right-wing mind of America, pursuing a hateful war against a mirror-image of the same “sectarian, dogmatic” ideological mentality in the Communist camp. It is part of the same pattern that both centers of power have the most rigid laws against marijuana. And that marijuana and versions of the African ritual music (rock ‘n’ roll) are slowly catalyzing anti-ideological consciousness of the new generations on both sides of the Iron-Time curtain.
I believe that future generations will have to rely on new faculties of awareness, rather than on new versions of old idea-systems, to cope with the increasing godlike complexity of our planetary civilization, with its overpopulation, its threat of atomic annihilation, its centralized network of abstract word-image communication, its power to leave the earth. A new consciousness, or new awareness, will evolve to meet a changed ecological environment. It has already begun evolving in younger generations from Prague to Calcutta; part of the process is a re-examination of certain heretofore discarded “primitive” devices of communication with Self and Selves. Negro worship rituals have invaded the West via New Orleans and Liverpool, in altered but still recognizably functional form. The consciousness-expanding drugs (psychedelics) occupy attention in the highest intellectual circles of the West, as well as among a great mass of youth. The odd perceptions of Zen, Tibetan yoga, mantra yoga, and indigenous American Shamanism affect the consciousness of a universal generation, children who can recognize each other by hairstyle, tone of voice, attitude to nature, and attitude to Civilization. The airwaves are filled with songs of hitherto unheard-of frankness and beauty.
These then are some of the political or social implications of the legalization of marijuana as a catalyst to self-awareness. The generalizations I have made may also apply to the deeper affects and deeper social changes that may be catalyzed thru the already massive use of psychedelic drugs.
And it is significant that, as marijuana was once monopolized by a small rabid bureaucracy in the Treasury Department, the psychedelic drugs have this year in America been officially monopolized by the Pure Food and Drug Administration — within months a large amateur police force has mushroomed. I’ve heard it rumored that the precise group of citizens least equipped for “responsibility” in this area — the least “mature” pressure-group in the States — already acts in an advisory capacity on licensing. This group is the Chemical Warfare Division of the Pentagon.
A LITTLE ANTHOLOGY OF MARIJUANA
FOOTNOTES
1 Editorial in the English Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, November 9, 1963. ….At most of the recent references the question was raised whether the marijuana problem might be abolished by removing the substance from the list of dangerous drugs where it was placed in 1951, and giving it the same social status as alcohol by legalizing its import and consumption.
This suggestion is worth considering. Besides the undoubted attraction of reducing, for once, the number of crimes that a member of our society can commit, and of allowing the wider spread of something that can give pleasure, a greater revenue would certainly come to the State from taxation than from fines. Additional gains might be the reduction of interracial tension, as well as that between generations; for ‘pot’ spread from South America to Britain via the United States and the West Indies. Here it has been taken up by the younger members of a society in which alcohol is the inheritance of the more elderly.
2 Anslinger, Harry J., and Oursler, W. C.: The Murderers, Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1961 (p. 38).
Much of the irrational juvenile violence and killing that has written a new chapter of shame and tragedy is traceable directly to this hemp intoxication….
As the Marijuana situation grew worse, I knew action had to be taken to get proper control legislation passed. By 1937, under my direction, the Bureau launched two important steps: First, a legislative plan to seek from congress a new law that would place Marijuana and its distribution directly under federal control. Second, on radio and at major forums, such as that presented annually by the New York Herald Tribune, I told the story of this evil weed of the fields and river beds and roadsides. I wrote articles for magazines; our agents gave hundreds of lectures to parents, educators, social and civic leaders. In network broadcasts I reported on the growing list of crimes, including murder and rape. I described the nature of Marijuana and its close kinship to hashish. I continued to hammer at the facts.
I believe we did a thorough job, for the public was alerted, and the laws to protect them were passed, both nationally and at the state level.
3 H.J. Anslinger, Commissioner of Narcotics, Correspondence, Journal of the American Medical Association, Jan. 16, 1943 (p. 212).
….information in our possession…that marijuana precipitates in certain persons psychoses and unstable and disorganized personality … may be an important contributory cause to crime … by relaxing inhibitions may permit antisocial tendencies…
Of course, the primary interest of the Bureau of Narcotics is in the enforcement aspect. From that point of view it is very unfortunate that Drs. Allentuck and Bowman should have stated so unqualifiedly that use of marijuana does not lead to physical, mental, or moral degeneration and that no permanent deleterious effects from its continued use were observed.
4 “Traffic in Opium and Other Dangerous Drugs,&#
8221; Report by the Government of the United States of America for the Year Ended December 31st, 1938, by Hon. H. J. Anslinger, Commissioner of Narcotics (p. 7). “The Narcotics Section recognizes the great danger of marijuana due to its definite impairment of the mentality and the fact that its continuous use leads direct to the insane asylum.”
5 As stated in the text, which stands almost completely unrevised from first composition, the author smoked one marijuana cigarette at the beginning of the fourth paragraph.
6 The author is still high to the end of Section I.
7 The Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics, Goodman and Gillman, 1956 ed., (p. 20). “The federal narcotic regulations and a number of supplementary laws include drugs such as papaverine and marijuana which do not produce narcosis.”
(pp. 170-177). “There are no lasting ill effects from the acute use of marijuana, and fatalities have not been known to occur.
Careful and complete medical and neuropsychiatric examinations of habitués reveal no pathological conditions or disorders of cerebral functions attributable to the drug.
“Although habituation occurs, psychic dependence is not as prominent or compelling as in the case of morphine, alcohol, or perhaps even tobacco habituation.”
8 Hearings before the Committee on Ways and Means, U.S. House of Representatives, 75th Congress, 1st session April and May 1937: House Marijuana Hearings (p. 24).
Rep. John Dingall: “I am just wondering whether the marijuana addict graduates into a heroin, an opium, or a cocaine user?”
Anslinger: “No, sir. I have not heard of a case of that kind. I think it is an entirely different class. The marijuana addict does not go in that direction.”
9 In historical context this recent excuse for repression of marijuana seemed to the author so irrational that it was unnecessary to analyze. Yet public confusion may warrant some precise analysis.

A) There are no legitimate sociological/medical study documents warranting the Narcotics Department’s assertion of causal relation between use of marijuana and graduation to opiates.

B) There never had been any hint of such association before the two classes of drugs were forcibly juxtaposed in black market by said department; Anslinger testified to that in 1937. (see footnote #8).

C) A greater number of opiate users started with bananas, cigarettes and alcohol than started with marijuana — no causal relationship is indicated in any case.

D) The number of millions of respectable Americans who smoke marijuana have obviously not proceeded to opiates.

E) In test sociological cases, i.e., societies such as Morocco and India where marijuana use is universal, there is very small use of opiates and no social association or juxtaposition between the two classes of drugs. What juxtaposition there is in America has been created and encouraged by the propaganda and repression tactics of the Narcotics Bureau.
10 Saddhana: yogic path or discipline.
11 Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893-94, Ch. XIII (263-264, par. 552)
Summary of conclusions regarding effects. The Commission have now examined all the evidence before them regarding the effects attributed to hemp drugs. It will be well to summarize briefly the conclusions to which they come. It has been clearly established that the occasional use of hemp in moderate doses may be beneficial; but this use may be regarded as medicinal in character. It is rather to the popular and common use of the drugs that the Commission will now confine their attention. It is convenient to consider the effects separately as affecting the physical, mental or moral nature. In regard to the physical effects, the Commission have come to the conclusion that the moderate use of hemp drugs is practically attended by no evil results at all. There may be exceptional cases in which, owing to idiosyncrasies of constitution, the drugs in even moderate use may be injurious. There is probably nothing the use of which may not possibly be injurious in cases of exceptional intolerance….
In respect to the alleged mental effects of the drugs, the Commission have come to the conclusion that the moderate use of hemp drugs produces no injurious effects on the mind….
In regard to the moral effects or the drugs, the Commission are of opinion that their moderate use produces no moral injury whatever. There is no adequate ground for believing that it injuriously affects the character of the consumer…for all practical purposes it may be laid down that there is little or no connection between the use of hemp drugs and crime.
Viewing the subject generally, it may be added that the moderate use of these drugs is the rule, and that the excessive use is comparatively exceptional.
12 Panama Canal Zone Governor’s Committee, Apr.-Dec. 1925: (The Military Surgeon, Journal of the Association of Military Surgeons of the United States, November 1933, p. 274).
After an investigation extending from April 1 to December 1925, the Committee reached the following conclusions:
There is no evidence that marijuana as grown here is a “habit-forming” drug in the sense in which the term is applied to alcohol, opium, cocaine, etc., or that it has any appreciably deleterious influence on the individual using it.
Panama Canal Zone Governor’s Committee, June 1931 (vide supra, p. 278):
Delinquencies due to marijuana smoking which result in trial by military court are negligible in number when compared with delinquencies resulting from the use of alcoholic drinks which also may be classed as stimulants and intoxicants.
13 12,229 convictions for marijuana in 1963 and 1964 reported from California alone, according to Prof. Lindesmith. The whole scene is so shrouded in bureaucratic mystery that there are no national figures available anywhere.
14 By March 1966 Dr. Timothy Leary faced a minimum of 5 years in jail and A.P. reported that the celebrated novelist Ken Kesey was a refugee in Mexico threatened with extradition by the FBI to face marijuana charges in California.
15 Proceedings White House Conference on Narcotic and Drug Abuse, September 27-28, 1962, State Department Auditorium, Washington, D. C. (p. 286). It is the opinion of the Panel that the hazards of Marijuana per se have been exaggerated and that long criminal sentences imposed on an occasional user or possessor of the drug are in poor social perspective. Although Marijuana has long held the reputation of inciting individuals to commit sexual offenses and other antisocial acts, the evidence is inadequate to substantiate this. Tolerance and physical dependence do not develop and withdrawal does not produce an abstinence syndrome.
16 Reply received December 22, 1965:
“I would advise you that I have been in touch with the Bureau of Narcotics and am of the opinion that nothing has been done in your case that is illegal or inconsistent with law enforcement practices designed to enforce the narcotics laws.” In this case it was police request to arrested friends that they carry marijuana to my apartment and to that of the novelist William S. Burroughs.
17 New York Herald Tribune, November 22, 1963.

__________

Nocturne – Germaine Tailleferre

Colours Of Mystery – Georges Auric

Hashish Poems:
Bread, Hashish And Moon
When the moon is born in the east,

And the white rooftops drift asleep

Under the heaped-up light,

People leave their shops and march forth in groups

To meet the moon

Carrying bread, and a radio, to the mountaintops,

And their narcotics.

There they buy and sell fantasies

And images,

And die – as the moon comes to life.

What does that luminous disc

Do to my homeland?

The land of the prophets,

The land of the simple,

The chewers of tobacco, the dealers in drug?

What does the moon do to us,

That we squander our valor

And live only to beg from Heaven?

What has the heaven

For the lazy and the weak?

When the moon comes to life they are changed to

corpses,

And shake the tombs of the saints,

Hoping to be granted some rice, some children…

They spread out their fine and elegant rugs,

And console themselves with an opium we call fate

And destiny.

In my land, the land of the simple

What weakness and decay

Lay hold of us, when the light streams forth!

Rugs, thousands of baskets,

Glasses of tea and children swarn over the hills.

In my land,

where the simple weep,

And live in the light they cannot perceive;

In my land,

Where people live without eyes,

And pray,

And fornicate,

And live in resignation,

As they always have,

Calling on the crescent moon:

” O Crescent Moon!

O suspended God of Marble!

O unbelievable object!

Always you have been for the east, for us,

A cluster of diamonds,

For the millions whose senses are numbed”

On those eastern nights when

The moon waxes full,

The east divests itself of all honor

And vigor.

The millions who go barefoot,

Who believe in four wives

And the day of judgment;

The millions who encounter bread

Only in their dreams;

Who spend the night in houses

Built of coughs;

Who have never set eyes on medicine;

Fall down like corpses beneath the light.

In my land,

where the stupid weep

And die weeping

Whenever the crescent moon appears

And their tears increase;

Whenever some wretched lute moves them…

or the song to “night”

In my land,

In the land of the simple,

where we slowly chew on our unending songs-

A form of consumption destroying the east-

Our east chewing on its history,

its lethargic dreams,

Its empty legends,

Our east that sees the sum of all heroism

In Picaresque Abu Zayd al Hilali.
-Nizar Qabbani

—-

—-

The Hashish Eater -or- the Apocalypse of Evil
Bow down: I am the emperor of dreams;

I crown me with the million-colored sun

Of secret worlds incredible, and take

Their trailing skies for vestment when I soar,

Throned on the mounting zenith, and illume

The spaceward-flown horizons infinite.

Like rampant monsters roaring for their glut,

The fiery-crested oceans rise and rise,

By jealous moons maleficently urged

To follow me for ever; mountains horned

With peaks of sharpest adamant, and mawed

With sulphur-lit volcanoes lava-langued,

Usurp the skies with thunder, but in vain;

And continents of serpent-shapen trees,

With slimy trunks that lengthen league by league,

Pursue my light through ages spurned to fire

By that supreme ascendance; sorcerers,

And evil kings, predominanthly armed

With scrolls of fulvous dragon-skin whereon

Are worm-like runes of ever-twisting flame,

Would stay me; and the sirens of the stars,

With foam-like songs from silver fragrance wrought,

Would lure me to their crystal reefs; and moons

Where viper-eyed, senescent devils dwell,

With antic gnomes abominably wise,

Heave up their icy horns across my way.

But naught deters me from the goal ordained

By suns and eons and immortal wars,

And sung by moons and motes; the goal whose name

Is all the secret of forgotten glyphs

By sinful gods in torrid rubies writ

For ending of a brazen book; the goal

Whereat my soaring ecstasy may stand

In amplest heavens multiplied to hold

My hordes of thunder-vested avatars,

And Promethèan armies of my thought,

That brandish claspèd levins. There I call

My memories, intolerably clad

In light the peaks of paradise may wear,

And lead the Armageddon of my dreams

Whose instant shout of triumph is become

Immensity’s own music: for their feet

Are founded on innumerable worlds,

Remote in alien epochs, and their arms

Upraised, are columns potent to exalt

With ease ineffable the countless thrones

Of all the gods that are or gods to be,

And bear the seats of Asmodai and Set

Above the seventh paradise.
Supreme

In culminant omniscience manifold,

And served by senses multitudinous,

Far-posted on the shifting walls of time,

With eyes that roam the star-unwinnowed fields

Of utter night and chaos, I convoke

The Babel of their visions, and attend

At once their myriad witness. I behold

In Ombos, where the fallen Titans dwell,

With mountain-builded walls, and gulfs for moat,

The secret cleft that cunning dwarves have dug

Beneath an alp-like buttress; and I list,

Too late, the clam of adamantine gongs

Dinned by their drowsy guardians, whose feet

Have fell the wasp-like sting of little knives

Embrued With slobber of the basilisk

Or the pail Juice of wounded upas. In

Some red Antarean garden-world, I see

The sacred flower with lips of purple flesh,

And silver-Lashed, vermilion-lidded eyes

Of torpid azure; whom his furtive priests

At moonless eve in terror seek to slay

With bubbling grails of sacrificial blood

That hide a hueless poison. And I read

Upon the tongue of a forgotten sphinx,

The annulling word a spiteful demon wrote

In gall of slain chimeras; and I know

What pentacles the lunar wizards use,

That once allured the gulf-returning roc,

With ten great wings of furlèd storm, to pause

Midmost an alabaster mount; and there,

With boulder-weighted webs of dragons’ gut

Uplift by cranes a captive giant built,

They wound the monstrous, moonquake-throbbing bird,

And plucked from off his saber-taloned feet

Uranian sapphires fast in frozen blood,

And amethysts from Mars. I lean to read

With slant-lipped mages, in an evil star,

The monstrous archives of a war that ran

Through wasted eons, and the prophecy

Of wars renewed, which shall commemorate

Some enmity of wivern-headed kings

Even to the brink of time. I know the blooms

Of bluish fungus, freaked with mercury,

That bloat within the creators of the moon,

And in one still, selenic and fetor; and I know

What clammy blossoms, blanched and cavern-grown,

Are proffered to their gods in Uranus

By mole-eyed peoples; and the livid seed

Of some black fruit a king in Saturn ate,

Which, cast upon his tinkling palace-floor,

Took root between the burnished flags, and now

Hath mounted and become a hellish tree,

Whose lithe and hairy branches, lined with mouths,

Net like a hundred ropes his lurching throne,

And strain at starting pillars. I behold

The slowly-thronging corals that usurp

Some harbour of a million-masted sea,

And sun them on the league-long wharves of gold—

Bulks of enormous crimson, kraken-limbed

And kraken-headed, lifting up as crowns

The octiremes of perished emperors,

And galleys fraught with royal gems, that sailed

From a sea-fled haven.
Swifter and stranger grow

The visions: now a mighty city looms,

Hewn from a hill of purest cinnabar

To domes and turrets like a sunrise thronged

With tier on tier of captive moons, half-drowned

In shifting erubescence. But whose hands

Were sculptors of its doors, and columns wrought

To semblance of prodigious blooms of old,

No eremite hath lingered there to say,

And no man comes to learn: for long ago

A prophet came, warning its timid king

Against the plague of lichens that had crept

Across subverted empires, and the sand

Of wastes that cyclopean mountains ward;

Which, slow and ineluctable, would come

To take his fiery bastions and his fanes,

And quench his domes with greenish tetter. Now

I see a host of naked gents, armed

With horns of behemoth and unicorn,

Who wander, blinded by the clinging spells

O hostile wizardry, and stagger on

To forests where the very leaves have eyes,

And ebonies like wrathful dragons roar

To teaks a-chuckle in the loathly gloom;

Where coiled lianas lean, with serried fangs,

From writhing palms with swollen boles that moan;

Where leeches of a scarlet moss have sucked

The eyes of some dead monster, and have crawled

To bask upon his azure-spotted spine;

Where hydra-throated blossoms hiss and sing,

Or yawn with mouths that drip a sluggish dew

Whose touch is death and slow corrosion. Then

I watch a war of pygmies, met by night,

With pitter of their drums of parrot’s hide,

On plains with no horizon, where a god

Might lose his way for centuries; and there,

In wreathèd light and fulgors all convolved,

A rout of green, enormous moons ascend,

With rays that like a shivering venom run

On inch-long swords of lizard-fang.
Surveyed

From this my throne, as from a central sun,

The pageantries of worlds and cycles pass;

Forgotten splendors, dream by dream, unfold

Like tapestry, and vanish; violet suns,

Or suns of changeful iridescence, bring

Their rays about me like the colored lights

Imploring priests might lift to glorify

The face of some averted god; the songs

Of mystic poets in a purple world

Ascend to me in music that is made

From unconceivèd perfumes and the pulse

Of love ineffable; the lute-players

Whose lutes are strung with gold of the utmost moon,

Call forth delicious languors, never known

Save to their golden kings; the sorcerers

Of hooded stars inscrutable to God,

Surrender me their demon-wrested scrolls,

lnscribed with lore of monstrous alchemies

And awful transformations.
If I will

I am at once the vision and the seer,

And mingle with my ever-streaming pomps,

And still abide their suzerain: I am

The neophyte who serves a nameless god,

Within whose fane the fanes of Hecatompylos

Were arks the Titan worshippers might bear,

Or flags to pave the threshold; or I am

The god himself, who calls the fleeing clouds

Into the nave where suns might congregate

And veils the darkling mountain of his face

With fold on solemn fold; for whom the priests

Amass their monthly hecatomb of gems

Opals that are a camel-cumbering load,

And monstrous alabraundines, won from war

With realms of hostile serpents; which arise,

Combustible, in vapors many-hued

And myrrh-excelling perfumes. It is I,

The king, who holds with scepter-dropping hand

The helm of some great barge of orichalchum,

Sailing upon an amethystine sea

To isles of timeless summer: for the snows

Of Hyperborean winter, and their winds,

Sleep in his jewel-builded capital,

Nor any charm of flame-wrought wizardry,

Nor conjured suns may rout them; so he fees,

With captive kings to urge his serried oars,

Hopeful of dales where amaranthine dawn

Hath never left the faintly sighing lote

And lisping moly. Firm of heart, I fare

Impanoplied with azure diamond,

As hero of a quest Achernar lights,

To deserts filled with ever-wandering flames

That feed upon the sullen marl, and soar

To wrap the slopes of mountains, and to leap

With tongues intolerably lengthening

That lick the blenchèd heavens. But there lives

(Secure as in a garden walled from wind)

A lonely flower by a placid well,

Midmost the flaring tumult of the flames,

That roar as roars a storm-possessed sea,

Impacable for ever; and within

That simple grail the blossom lifts, there lies

One drop of an incomparable dew

Which heals the parchèd weariness of kings,

And cures the wound of wisdom. I am page

To an emperor who reigns ten thousand years,

And through his labyrinthine palace-rooms,

Through courts and colonnades and balconies

Wherein immensity itself is mazed,

I seek the golden gorget he hath lost,

On which, in sapphires fine as orris-seed,

Are writ the names of his conniving stars

And friendly planets. Roaming thus, I hear

Like demon tears incessant, through dark ages,

The drip of sullen clepsydrae; and once

In every lustrum, hear the brazen clocks

Innumerably clang with such a sound

As brazen hammers make, by devils dinned

On tombs of all the dead; and nevermore

I find the gorget, but at length I find

A sealèd room whose nameless prisoner

Moans with a nameless torture, and would turn

To hell’s red rack as to a lilied couch

From that whereon they stretched him; and I find,

Prostrate upon a lotus-painted floor,

The loveliest of all beloved slaves

My emperor hath, and from her pulseless side

A serpent rises, whiter than the root

Of some venefic bloom in darkness grown,

And gazes up with green-lit eyes that seem

Like drops of cold, congealing poison.
Hark!

What word was whispered in a tongue unknown,

In crypts of some impenetrable world?

Whose is the dark, dethroning secrecy

I cannot share, though I am king of suns,

And king therewith of strong eternity,

Whose gnomons with their swords of shadow guard

My gates, and slay the intruder? Silence loads

The wind of ether, and the worlds are still

To hear the word that flees mine audience.

In simultaneous ruin, al my dreams

Fall like a rack of fuming vapors raised

To semblance by a necromant, and leave

Spirit and sense unthinkably alone

Above a universe of shrouded stars

And suns that wander, cowled with sullen gloom,

Like witches to a Sabbath. . . . Fear is born

In crypts below the nadir, and hath crawled

Reaching the floor of space, and waits for wings

To lift it upward like a hellish worm

Fain for the flesh of cherubim. Red orbs

And eyes that gleam remotely as the stars,

But are not eyes of suns or galaxies,

Gather and throng to the base of darkness; flame

Behind some black, abysmal curtain burns,

Implacable, and fanned to whitest wrath

By raisèd wings that flail the whiffled gloom,

And make a brief and broken wind that moans

As one who rides a throbbing rack. There is

A Thing that crouches, worlds and years remote,

Whose horns a demon sharpens, rasping forth

A note to shatter the donjon-keeps of time,

Or crack the sphere of crystal. All is dark

For ages, and my toiling heart-suspends

Its clamor as within the clutch of death

Tightening with tense, hermetic rigors. Then,

In one enormous, million-flashing flame,

The stars unveil, the suns remove their cowls,

And beam to their responding planets; time

Is mine once more, and armies of its dreams

Rally to that insuperable throne

Firmed on the zenith.
Once again I seek

The meads of shining moly I had found

In some anterior vision, by a stream

No cloud hath ever tarnished; where the sun,

A gold Narcissus, loiters evermore

Above his golden image. But I find

A corpse the ebbing water will not keep,

With eyes like sapphires that have lain in hell|

And felt the hissing coals; and all the flowers

About me turn to hooded serpents, swayed

By flutes of devils in lascivious dance

Meet for the nod of Satan, when he reigns

Above the raging Sabbath, and is wooed

By sarabands of witches. But I turn

To mountains guarding with their horns of snow

The source of that befoulèd rill, and seek

A pinnacle where none but eagles climb,

And they with failing pennons. But in vain

I flee, for on that pylon of the sky

Some curse hath turned the unprinted snow to flame—

Red fires that curl and cluster to my tread,

Trying the summit’s narrow cirque. And now

I see a silver python far beneath-

Vast as a river that a fiend hath witched

And forced to flow reverted in its course

To mountains whence it issued. Rapidly

It winds from slope to crumbling slope, and fills

Ravines and chasmal gorges, till the crags

Totter with coil on coil incumbent. Soon

It hath entwined the pinnacle I keep,

And gapes with a fanged, unfathomable maw

Wherein Great Typhon and Enceladus

Were orts of daily glut. But I am gone,

For at my call a hippogriff hath come,

And firm between his thunder-beating wings

I mount the sheer cerulean walls of noon

And see the earth, a spurnèd pebble, fall—

Lost in the fields of nether stars—and seek

A planet where the outwearied wings of time

Might pause and furl for respite, or the plumes

Of death be stayed, and loiter in reprieve

Above some deathless lily: for therein

Beauty hath found an avatar of flowers-

Blossoms that clothe it as a colored flame

From peak to peak, from pole to sullen pole,

And turn the skies to perfume. There I find

A lonely castle, calm, and unbeset

Save by the purple spears of amaranth,

And leafing iris tender-sworded. Walls

Of flushèd marble, wonderful with rose,

And domes like golden bubbles, and minarets

That take the clouds as coronal-these are mine,

For voiceless looms the peaceful barbican,

And the heavy-teethed portcullis hangs aloft

To grin a welcome. So I leave awhile

My hippogriff to crop the magic meads,

And pass into a court the lilies hold,

And tread them to a fragrance that pursues

To win the portico, whose columns, carved

Of lazuli and amber, mock the palms

Of bright Aidennic forests-capitalled

With fronds of stone fretted to airy lace,

Enfolding drupes that seem as tawny clusters

Of breasts of unknown houris; and convolved

With vines of shut and shadowy-leavèd flowers

Like the dropt lids of women that endure

Some loin-dissolving ecstasy. Through doors

Enlaid with lilies twined luxuriously,

I enter, dazed and blinded with the sun,

And hear, in gloom that changing colors cloud,

A chuckle sharp as crepitating ice

Upheaved and cloven by shoulders of the damned

Who strive in Antenora. When my eyes

Undazzle, and the cloud of color fades,

I find me in a monster-guarded room,

Where marble apes with wings of griffins crowd

On walls an evil sculptor wrought, and beasts

Wherein the sloth and vampire-bat unite,

Pendulous by their toes of tarnished bronze,

Usurp the shadowy interval of lamps

That hang from ebon arches. Like a ripple

Borne by the wind from pool to sluggish pool

In fields where wide Cocytus flows his bound,

A crackling smile around that circle runs,

And all the stone-wrought gibbons stare at me

With eyes that turn to glowing coals. A fear

That found no name in Babel, flings me on,

Breathless and faint with horror, to a hall

Within whose weary, self-reverting round,

The languid curtains, heavier than palls,

Unnumerably depict a weary king

Who fain would cool his jewel-crusted hands

In lakes of emerald evening, or the field

Of dreamless poppies pure with rain. I flee

Onward, and all the shadowy curtains shake

With tremors of a silken-sighing mirth,

And whispers of the innumerable king,

Breathing a tale of ancient pestilence

Whose very words are vile contagion. Then

I reach a room where caryatids,

Carved in the form of voluptuous Titan women,

Surround a throne flowering ebony

Where creeps a vine of crystal. On the throne

There lolls a wan, enormous Worm, whose bulk,

Tumid with all the rottenness of kings,

Overflows its arms with fold on creasèd fold

Obscenely bloating. Open-mouthed he leans,

And from his fulvous throat a score of tongues,

Depending like to wreaths of torpid vipers,

Drivel with phosphorescent slime, that runs

Down all his length of soft and monstrous folds,

And creeping among the flowers of ebony,

Lends them the life of tiny serpents. Now,

Ere the Horror ope those red and lashless slits

Of eyes that draw the gnat and midge, I turn

And follow down a dusty hall, whose gloom,

Lined by the statues with their mighty limbs,

Ends in golden-roofèd balcony

Sphering the flowered horizon.
Ere my heart

Hath hushed the panic tumult of its pulses,

I listen, from beyond the horizon’s rim,

A mutter faint as when the far simoom,

Mounting from unknown deserts, opens forth,

Wide as the waste, those wings of torrid night

That shake the doom of cities from their folds,

And musters in its van a thousand winds

That, with disrooted palms for besoms, rise,

And sweep the sands to fury. As the storm,

Approaching, mounts and loudens to the ears

Of them that toil in fields of sesame,

So grows the mutter, and a shadow creeps

Above the gold horizon like a dawn

Of darkness climbing zenith-ward. They come,

The Sabaoth of retribution, drawn

From all dread spheres that knew my trespassing,

And led by vengeful fiends and dire alastors

That owned my sway aforetime! Cockatrice,

Chimera, martichoras, behemoth,

Geryon, and sphinx, and hydra, on my ken

Arise as might some Afrit-builded city

Consummate in the lifting of a lash

With thunderous domes and sounding obelisks

And towers of night and fire alternate! Wings

Of white-hot stone along the hissing wind

Bear up the huge and furnace-hearted beasts

Of hells beyond Rutilicus; and things

Whose lightless length would mete the gyre of moons—

Born from the caverns of a dying sun

Uncoil to the very zenith, half-disclosed

From gulfs below the horizon; octopi

Like blazing moons with countless arms of fire,

Climb from the seas of ever-surging flame

That roll and roar through planets unconsumed,

Beating on coasts of unknown metals; beasts

That range the mighty worlds of Alioth rise,

Afforesting the heavens with mulitudinous horns

Amid whose maze the winds are lost; and borne

On cliff-like brows of plunging scolopendras,

The shell-wrought towers of ocean-witches loom;

And griffin-mounted gods, and demons throned

On-sable dragons, and the cockodrills

That bear the spleenful pygmies on their backs;

And blue-faced wizards from the worlds of Saiph,

On whom Titanic scorpions fawn; and armies

That move with fronts reverted from the foe,

And strike athwart their shoulders at the shapes

The shields reflect in crystal; and eidola

Fashioned within unfathomable caves

By hands of eyeless peoples; and the blind

Worm-shapen monsters of a sunless world,

With krakens from the ultimate abyss,

And Demogorgons of the outer dark,

Arising, shout with dire multisonous clamors,

And threatening me with dooms ineffable

In words whereat the heavens leap to flame,

Advance upon the enchanted palace. Falling

For league on league before, their shadows light

And eat like fire the arnaranthine meads,

Leaving an ashen desert. In the palace

I hear the apes of marble shriek and howl,

And all the women-shapen columns moan,

Babbling with terror. In my tenfold fear,

A monstrous dread unnamed in any hall,

I rise, and flee with the fleeing wind for wings,

And in a trice the wizard palace reefs,

And spring to a single tower of flame,

Goes out, and leaves nor shard nor ember! Flown

Beyond the world upon that fleeing wind

I reach the gulf’s irrespirable verge,

Where fads the strongest storm for breath, and fall,

Supportless, through the nadir-plungèd gloom,

Beyond the scope and vision of the sun,

To other skies and systems.
In a world

Deep-wooded with the multi-colored fungi

That soar to semblance of fantastic palms,

I fall as falls the meteor-stone, and break

A score of trunks to atom powder. Unharmed

I rise, and through the illimitable woods,

Among the trees of flimsy opal, roam,

And see their tops that clamber hour by hour

To touch the suns of iris. Things unseen,

Whose charnel breath informs the tideless air

With spreading pools of fetor, follow me,

Elusive past the ever-changing palms;

And pittering moths with wide and ashen wings

Flit on before, and insects ember-hued,

Descending, hurtle through the gorgeous gloom

And quench themselves in crumbling thickets. Heard

Far off, the gong-like roar of beasts unknown

Resounds at measured intervals of time,

Shaking the riper trees to dust, that falls

In clouds of acrid perfume, stifling me

Beneath an irised pall.
Now the palmettoes

Grow far apart, and lessen momently

To shrubs a dwarf might topple. Over them

I see an empty desert, all ablaze

With ametrysts and rubies, and the dust

Of garnets or carnelians. On I roam,

Treading the gorgeous grit, that dazzles me

With leaping waves of endless rutilance,

Whereby the air is turned to a crimson gloom

Through which I wander blind as any Kobold;

Till underfoot the grinding sands give place

To stone or metal, with a massive ring

More welcome to mine ears than golden bells

Or tinkle of silver fountains. When the gloom

Of crimson lifts, I stand upon the edge

Of a broad black plain of adamant that reaches,

Level as windless water, to the verge

Of all the world; and through the sable plain

A hundred streams of shattered marble run,

And streams of broken steel, and streams of bronze,

Like to the ruin of all the wars of time,

To plunge with clangor of timeless cataracts

Adown the gulfs eternal.
So I follow

Between a river of steel and a river of bronze,

With ripples loud and tuneless as the clash

Of a million lutes; and come to the precipice

From which they fall, and make the mighty sound

Of a million swords that meet a million shields,

Or din of spears and armour in the wars

Of half the worlds and eons. Far beneath

They fall, through gulfs and cycles of the void,

And vanish like a stream of broken stars

into the nether darkness; nor the gods

Of any sun, nor demons of the gulf,

Will dare to know what everlasting sea

Is fed thereby, and mounts forevermore

In one unebbing tide.
What nimbus-cloud

Or night of sudden and supreme eclipse,

Is on the suns opal? At my side

The rivers run with a wan and ghostly gleam

Through darkness falling as the night that falls

From spheres extinguished. Turning, I behold

Betwixt the sable desert and the suns,

The poisèd wings of all the dragon-rout,

Far-flown in black occlusion thousand-fold

Through stars, and deeps, and devastated worlds,

Upon my trail of terror! Griffins, rocs,

And sluggish, dark chimeras, heavy-winged

After the ravin of dispeopled lands,

And harpies, and the vulture-birds of hell,

Hot from abominable feasts, and fain

To cool their beaks and talons in my blood—

All, all have gathered, and the wingless rear,

With rank on rank of foul, colossal Worms,

Makes horrent now the horizon. From the wan

I hear the shriek of wyvers, loud and shrill

As tempests in a broken fane, and roar

Of sphinxes, like relentless toll of bells

From towers infernal. Cloud on hellish cloud

They arch the zenith, and a dreadful wind

Falls from them like the wind before the storm,

And in the wind my riven garment streams

And flutters in the face of all the void,

Even as flows a flaffing spirit, lost

On the pit s undying tempest. Louder grows

The thunder of the streams of stone and bronze—

Redoubled with the roar of torrent wings

Inseparable mingled. Scarce I keep

My footing in the gulfward winds of fear,

And mighty thunders beating to the void

In sea-like waves incessant; and would flee

With them, and prove the nadir-founded night

Where fall the streams of ruin. But when I reach

The verge, and seek through sun-defeating gloom

To measure with my gaze the dread descent,

I see a tiny star within the depths-

A light that stays me while the wings of doom

Convene their thickening thousands: for the star

increases, taking to its hueless orb,

With all the speed of horror-changèd dreams,

The light as of a million million moons;

And floating up through gulfs and glooms eclipsed

It grows and grows, a huge white eyeless Face

That fills the void and fills the universe,

And bloats against the limits of the world

With lips of flame that open . . .

-Clark Ashton Smith