Gwyllm.com

In Flanders Fields

By: Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD (1872-1918)

Canadian Army
In Flanders Fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses row on row,

That mark our place; and in the sky

The larks, still bravely singing, fly

Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

Loved and were loved, and now we lie

In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you from failing hands we throw

The torch; be yours to hold it high.

If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

In Flanders fields.

—

The Story…

McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields” remains to this day one of the most memorable war poems ever written. It is a lasting legacy of the terrible battle in the Ypres salient in the spring of 1915. Here is the story of the making of that poem:
Although he had been a doctor for years and had served in the South African War, it was impossible to get used to the suffering, the screams, and the blood here, and Major John McCrae had seen and heard enough in his dressing station to last him a lifetime.
As a surgeon attached to the 1st Field Artillery Brigade, Major McCrae, who had joined the McGill faculty in 1900 after graduating from the University of Toronto, had spent seventeen days treating injured men — Canadians, British, Indians, French, and Germans — in the Ypres salient.
It had been an ordeal that he had hardly thought possible. McCrae later wrote of it:
“I wish I could embody on paper some of the varied sensations of that seventeen days… Seventeen days of Hades! At the end of the first day if anyone had told us we had to spend seventeen days there, we would have folded our hands and said it could not have been done.”
One death particularly affected McCrae. A young friend and former student, Lieut. Alexis Helmer of Ottawa, had been killed by a shell burst on 2 May 1915. Lieutenant Helmer was buried later that day in the little cemetery outside McCrae’s dressing station, and McCrae had performed the funeral ceremony in the absence of the chaplain.
The next day, sitting on the back of an ambulance parked near the dressing station beside the Canal de l’Yser, just a few hundred yards north of Ypres, McCrae vented his anguish by composing a poem. The major was no stranger to writing, having authored several medical texts besides dabbling in poetry.
In the nearby cemetery, McCrae could see the wild poppies that sprang up in the ditches in that part of Europe, and he spent twenty minutes of precious rest time scribbling fifteen lines of verse in a notebook.
A young soldier watched him write it. Cyril Allinson, a twenty-two year old sergeant-major, was delivering mail that day when he spotted McCrae. The major looked up as Allinson approached, then went on writing while the sergeant-major stood there quietly. “His face was very tired but calm as we wrote,” Allinson recalled. “He looked around from time to time, his eyes straying to Helmer’s grave.”
When McCrae finished five minutes later, he took his mail from Allinson and, without saying a word, handed his pad to the young NCO. Allinson was moved by what he read:
“The poem was exactly an exact description of the scene in front of us both. He used the word blow in that line because the poppies actually were being blown that morning by a gentle east wind. It never occurred to me at that time that it would ever be published. It seemed to me just an exact description of the scene.”
In fact, it was very nearly not published. Dissatisfied with it, McCrae tossed the poem away, but a fellow officer retrieved it and sent it to newspapers in England. The Spectator, in London, rejected it, but Punch published it on 8 December 1915.

November 11 – Armistice Day
Click on the pic…

I had scads to write about it, about the differences I have seen it honoured in the US, and in Europe and it seems profoundly different. Instead of belabouring that point I had a good memory that ties into the day. When we lived in London there were the Chelsea Pensioners, at that time the majority were from WW1… they would sit along The Kings Road, and talk with people, sunning themselves in good weather, dissapearing when the rain clouds came. My favourite memory of them: Four or so old CP’s talking to a tribe of punk-rockers in the fall of 77′, all of the punks sitting around the old Vets, very attentive, and respectful. It was a thing of beauty. You could see a transmission of life, love, and respect going on. I often saw people buy the CP a pint at the local and bring it to them on the benches outside of the pub. They were honoured, and loved.
The great war, as WW1 was called was to be ‘The War To End All Wars’… which was a base lie, but you knew that already. It did produce some of the most touching poetry, and writing from all sides. It produced writers such as Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owens, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Andreas Latzko, T.E. Lawrence and others. Would they have been great poets/writers if the war hadn’t molded them? A fair question.
I have seen the results of war in my family,and in Mary’s as well. I pray that we as a species find another way of settling differences. The damage travels down the generations. It is the gift that keeps on giving, and its fruits are pain, sadness and more.
I have seen that the fields of Europe are haunted; you have but to walk in them to know it. There is no glory in war, there is only dying, and grief. Time for a change, time for a change.
Thoughts,
Gwyllm

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On The Menu:

The Links

Bombay Dub Orchestra – Mumtaz

Robert Graves: Quotes

The Angels Of Mons – (The Bowmen) This has a long intro, but very, very worth reading – G

The Poetry of Siegried Sassoon

Bombay Dub Orchestra Compassion RMX 09
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The Links:

Sea Snakes Seek Out Freshwater To Slake Thirst

Sounds like a Strad? Must be the mushrooms

Mysterious Dark Matter Might Actually Glow

The Fall

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Bombay Dub Orchestra – Mumtaz

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Robert Graves: Quotes
“If I were a girl, I’d despair. The supply of good women far exceeds that of the men who deserve them.”
“Kill if you must, but never hate: Man is but grass and hate is blight, The sun will scorch you soon or late, Die wholesome then, since you must fight”
“We forget cruelty and past betrayal, Heedless of where the next bright bolt may fall”
“If there’s no money in poetry, neither is there poetry in money.”
“What we now call ”finance” is, I hold, an intellectual perversion of what began as warm human love.”
“War was return of earth to ugly earth, War was foundering of sublimities, Extinction of each happy art and faith By which the world had still kept head in air, Protesting logic or protesting love, Until the unendurable moment struck – The inward scream”
“When the days of rejoicing are over,/ When the flags are stowed safely away,/ They will dream of another wild ‘War to End Wars’/ And another wild Armistice day.”

_____________

The Angels Of Mons – (The Bowmen)

– Arthur Machen

1915

Introduction
I have been asked to write an introduction to the story of “The Bowmen”, on its publication in book form together with three other tales of similar fashion. And I hesitate. This affair of “The Bowmen” has been such an odd one from first to last, so many queer complications have entered into it, there have been so many and so divers currents and cross-currents of rumour and speculation concerning it, that I honestly do not know where to begin. I propose, then, to solve the difficulty by apologising for beginning at all.
For, usually and fitly, the presence of an introduction is held to imply that there is something of consequence and importance to be introduced. If, for example, a man has made an anthology of great poetry, he may well write an introduction justifying his principle of selection, pointing out here and there, as the spirit moves him, high beauties and supreme excellencies, discoursing of the magnates and lords and princes of literature, whom he is merely serving as groom of the chamber. Introductions, that is, belong to the masterpieces and classics of the world, to the great and ancient and accepted things; and I am here introducing a short, small story of my own which appeared in The Evening News about ten months ago.
I appreciate the absurdity, nay, the enormity of the position in all its grossness. And my excuse for these pages must be this: that though the story itself is nothing, it has yet had such odd and unforeseen consequences and adventures that the tale of them may possess some interest. And then, again, there are certain psychological morals to be drawn from the whole matter of the tale and its sequel of rumours and discussions that are not, I think, devoid of consequence; and so to begin at the beginning.
This was in last August, to be more precise, on the last Sunday of last August. There were terrible things to be read on that hot Sunday morning between meat and mass. It was in The Weekly Dispatch that I saw the awful account of the retreat from Mons. I no longer recollect the details; but I have not forgotten the impression that was then on my mind, I seemed to see a furnace of torment and death and agony and terror seven times heated, and in the midst of the burning was the British Army. In the midst of the flame, consumed by it and yet aureoled in it, scattered like ashes and yet triumphant, martyred and for ever glorious. So I saw our men with a shining about them, so I took these thoughts with me to church, and, I am sorry to say, was making up a story in my head while the deacon was singing the Gospel.
This was not the tale of “The Bowmen”. It was the first sketch, as it were, of “The Soldiers’ Rest”. I only wish I had been able to write it as I conceived it. The tale as it stands is, I think, a far better piece of craft than “The Bowmen”, but the tale that came to me as the blue incense floated above the Gospel Book on the desk between the tapers: that indeed was a noble story–like all the stories that never get written. I conceived the dead men coming up through the flames and in the flames, and being welcomed in the Eternal Tavern with songs and flowing cups and everlasting mirth. But every man is the child of his age, however much he may hate it; and our popular religion has long determined that jollity is wicked. As far as I can make out modern Protestantism believes that Heaven is something like Evensong in an English cathedral, the service by Stainer and the Dean preaching. For those opposed to dogma of any kind–even the mildest–I suppose it is held that a Course of Ethical Lectures will be arranged.
Well, I have long maintained that on the whole the average church, considered as a house of preaching, is a much more poisonous place than the average tavern; still, as I say, one’s age masters one, and clouds and bewilders the intelligence, and the real story of “The Soldiers’ Rest”, with its “sonus epulantium in aeterno convivio”, was ruined at the moment of its birth, and it was some time later that the actual story got written. And in the meantime the plot of “The Bowmen” occurred to me. Now it has been murmured and hinted and suggested and whispered in all sorts of quarters that before I wrote the tale I had heard something. The most decorative of these legends is also the most precise: “I know for a fact that the whole thing was given him in typescript by a lady-in-waiting.” This was not the case; and all vaguer reports to the effect that I had heard some rumours or hints of rumours are equally void of any trace of truth.
Again I apologise for entering so pompously into the minutiae of my bit of a story, as if it were the lost poems of Sappho; but it appears that the subject interests the public, and I comply with my instructions. I take it, then, that the origins of “The Bowmen” were composite. First of all, all ages and nations have cherished the thought that spiritual hosts may come to the help of earthly arms, that gods and heroes and saints have descended from their high immortal places to fight for their worshippers and clients. Then Kipling’s story of the ghostly Indian regiment got in my head and got mixed with the mediaevalism that is always there; and so “The Bowmen” was written. I was heartily disappointed with it, I remember, and thought it–as I still think it–an indifferent piece of work. However, I have tried to write for these thirty-five long years, and if I have not become practised in letters, I am at least a past master in the Lodge of Disappointment. Such as it was, “The Bowmen” appeared in The Evening News of September 29th, 1914.
Now the journalist does not, as a rule, dwell much on the prospect of fame; and if he be an evening journalist, his anticipations of immortality are bounded by twelve o’clock at night at the latest; and it may well be that those insects which begin to live in the morning and are dead by sunset deem themselves immortal. Having written my story, having groaned and growled over it and printed it, I certainly never thought to hear another word of it. My colleague “The Londoner” praised it warmly to my face, as his kindly fashion is; entering, very properly, a technical caveat as to the language of the battle-cries of the bowmen. “Why should English archers use French terms?” he said. I replied that the only reason was this–that a “Monseigneur” here and there struck me as picturesque; and I reminded him that, as a matter of cold historical fact, most of the archers of Agincourt were mercenaries from Gwent, my native country, who would appeal to Mihangel and to saints not known to the Saxons–Teilo, Iltyd, Dewi, Cadwaladyr Vendigeid. And I thought that that was the first and last discussion of “The Bowmen”. But in a few days from its publication the editor of The Occult Review wrote to me. He wanted to know whether the story had any foundation in fact. I told him that it had no foundation in fact of any kind or sort; I forget whether I added that it had no foundation in rumour but I should think not, since to the best of my belief there were no rumours of heavenly interposition in existence at that time. Certainly I had heard of none. Soon afterwards the editor of Light wrote asking a like question, and I made him a like reply. It seemed to me that I had stifled any “Bowmen” mythos in the hour of its birth.
A month or two later, I received several requests from editors of parish magazines to reprint the story. I–or, rather, my editor–readily gave permission; and then, after another month or two, the conductor of one of these magazines wrote to me, saying that the February issue containing the story had been sold out, while there was still a great demand for it. Would I allow them to reprint “The Bowmen” as a pamphlet, and would I write a short preface giving
the exact authorities for the story? I replied that they might reprint in pamphlet form with all my heart, but that I could not give my authorities, since I had none, the tale being pure invention. The priest wrote again, suggesting–to my amazement–that I must be mistaken, that the main “facts” of “The Bowmen” must be true, that my share in the matter must surely have been confined to the elaboration and decoration of a veridical history. It seemed that my light fiction had been accepted by the congregation of this particular church as the solidest of facts; and it was then that it began to dawn on me that if I had failed in the art of letters, I had succeeded, unwittingly, in the art of deceit. This happened, I should think, some time in April, and the snowball of rumour that was then set rolling has been rolling ever since, growing bigger and bigger, till it is now swollen to a monstrous size.
It was at about this period that variants of my tale began to be told as authentic histories. At first, these tales betrayed their relation to their original. In several of them the vegetarian restaurant appeared, and St. George was the chief character. In one case an officer–name and address missing–said that there was a portrait of St. George in a certain London restaurant, and that a figure, just like the portrait, appeared to him on the battlefield, and was invoked by him, with the happiest results. Another variant–this, I think, never got into print–told how dead Prussians had been found on the battlefield with arrow wounds in their bodies. This notion amused me, as I had imagined a scene, when I was thinking out the story, in which a German general was to appear before the Kaiser to explain his failure to annihilate the English.
“All-Highest,” the general was to say, “it is true, it is impossible to deny it. The men were killed by arrows; the shafts were found in their bodies by the burying parties.”
I rejected the idea as over-precipitous even for a mere fantasy. I was therefore entertained when I found that what I had refused as too fantastical for fantasy was accepted in certain occult circles as hard fact.
Other versions of the story appeared in which a cloud interposed between the attacking Germans and the defending British. In some examples the cloud served to conceal our men from the advancing enemy; in others, it disclosed shining shapes which frightened the horses of the pursuing German cavalry. St. George, it will he noted, has disappeared–he persisted some time longer in certain Roman Catholic variants–and there are no more bowmen, no more arrows. But so far angels are not mentioned; yet they are ready to appear, and I think that I have detected the machine which brought them into the story.
In “The Bowmen” my imagined soldier saw “a long line of shapes, with a shining about them.” And Mr. A.P. Sinnett, writing in the May issue of The Occult Review, reporting what he had heard, states that “those who could see said they saw ‘a row of shining beings’ between the two armies.” Now I conjecture that the word “shining” is the link between my tale and the derivative from it. In the popular view shining and benevolent supernatural beings are angels, and so, I believe, the Bowmen of my story have become “the Angels of Mons.” In this shape they have been received with respect and credence everywhere, or almost everywhere.
And here, I conjecture, we have the key to the large popularity of the delusion–as I think it. We have long ceased in England to take much interest in saints, and in the recent revival of the cultus of St. George, the saint is little more than a patriotic figurehead. And the appeal to the saints to succour us is certainly not a common English practice; it is held Popish by most of our countrymen. But angels, with certain reservations, have retained their popularity, and so, when it was settled that the English army in its dire peril was delivered by angelic aid, the way was clear for general belief, and for the enthusiasms of the religion of the man in the street. And so soon as the legend got the title “The Angels of Mons” it became impossible to avoid it. It permeated the Press: it would not be neglected; it appeared in the most unlikely quarters–in Truth and Town Topics, The New Church Weekly (Swedenborgian) and John Bull. The editor of The Church Times has exercised a wise reserve: he awaits that evidence which so far is lacking; but in one issue of the paper I noted that the story furnished a text for a sermon, the subject of a letter, and the matter for an article. People send me cuttings from provincial papers containing hot controversy as to the exact nature of the appearances; the “Office Window” of The Daily Chronicle suggests scientific explanations of the hallucination; the Pall Mall in a note about St. James says he is of the brotherhood of the Bowmen of Mons–this reversion to the bowmen from the angels being possibly due to the strong statements that I have made on the matter. The pulpits both of the Church and of Non-conformity have been busy: Bishop Welldon, Dean Hensley Henson (a disbeliever), Bishop Taylor Smith (the Chaplain-General), and many other clergy have occupied themselves with the matter. Dr. Horton preached about the “angels” at Manchester; Sir Joseph Compton Rickett (President of the National Federation of Free Church Councils) stated that the soldiers at the front had seen visions and dreamed dreams, and had given testimony of powers and principalities fighting for them or against them. Letters come from all the ends of the earth to the Editor of The Evening News with theories, beliefs, explanations, suggestions. It is all somewhat wonderful; one can say that the whole affair is a psychological phenomenon of considerable interest, fairly comparable with the great Russian delusion of last August and September.

+++++++++++
Now it is possible that some persons, judging by the tone of these remarks of mine, may gather the impression that I am a profound disbeliever in the possibility of any intervention of the super-physical order in the affairs of the physical order. They will be mistaken if they make this inference; they will be mistaken if they suppose that I think miracles in Judaea credible but miracles in France or Flanders incredible. I hold no such absurdities. But I confess, very frankly, that I credit none of the “Angels of Mons” legends, partly because I see, or think I see, their derivation from my own idle fiction, but chiefly because I have, so far, not received one jot or tittle of evidence that should dispose me to belief. It is idle, indeed, and foolish enough for a man to say: “I am sure that story is a lie, because the supernatural element enters into it;” here, indeed, we have the maggot writhing in the midst of corrupted offal denying the existence of the sun. But if this fellow be a fool–as he is– equally foolish is he who says, “If the tale has anything of the supernatural it is true, and the less evidence the better;” and I am afraid this tends to be the attitude of many who call themselves occultists. I hope that I shall never get to that frame of mind. So I say, not that super-normal interventions are impossible, not that they have not happened during this war–I know nothing as to that point, one way or the other–but that there is not one atom of evidence (so far) to support the current stories of the angels of Mons. For, be it remarked, these stories are specific stories. They rest on the second, third, fourth, fifth hand stories told by “a soldier,” by “an officer,” by “a Catholic correspondent,” by “a nurse,” by any number of anonymous people. Indeed, names have been mentioned. A lady’s name has been drawn, most unwarrantably as it appears to me, into the discussion, and I have no doubt that this lady has been subject to a good deal of pestering and annoyance. She has written to the Editor of The Evening News denying all knowledge of the supposed miracle. The Psychical Research Society’s expert confesses that no real evidence has been proffered to her Society on the matter. And then, to my amazement, she accepts as fact the proposition that some men on the battlefield have been “hallucinated,” and proceeds to give the theory of sensory hallucination. She forgets that, by her own showing, there is no reason to suppose that anybody has been hallucinated at all. Someone (unknown) has met a nurse (unnamed) who has alked to a soldier (anonymous) who has seen angels. But that is not evidence; and not even Sam Weller at his gayest would have dared to offer it as such in the Court of Common Pleas. So far, then, nothing remotely approaching proof has been offered as to any supernatural intervention during the Retreat from Mons. Proof may come; if so, it will be interesting and more than interesting.
But, taking the affair as it stands at present, how is it that a nation plunged in materialism of the grossest kind has accepted idle rumours and gossip of the supernatural as certain truth? The answer is contained in the question: it is precisely because our whole atmosphere is materialist that we are ready to credit anything–save the truth. Separate a man from good drink, he will swallow methylated spirit with joy. Man is created to be inebriated; to be “nobly wild, not mad.” Suffer the Cocoa Prophets and their company to seduce him in body and spirit, and he will get himself stuff that will make him ignobly wild and mad indeed. It took hard, practical men of affairs, business men, advanced thinkers, Freethinkers, to believe in Madame Blavatsky and Mahatmas and the famous message from the Golden Shore: “Judge’s plan is right; follow him and stick.”
And the main responsibility for this dismal state of affairs undoubtedly lies on the shoulders of the majority of the clergy of the Church of England. Christianity, as Mr. W.L. Courtney has so admirably pointed out, is a great Mystery Religion; it is the Mystery Religion. Its priests are called to an awful and tremendous hierurgy; its pontiffs are to be the pathfinders, the bridge-makers between the world of sense and the world of spirit. And, in fact, they pass their time in preaching, not the eternal mysteries, but a twopenny morality, in changing the Wine of Angels and the Bread of Heaven into gingerbeer and mixed biscuits: a sorry transubstantiation, a sad alchemy, as it seems to me.

—-
The Bowmen

It was during the Retreat of the Eighty Thousand, and the authority of the Censorship is sufficient excuse for not being more explicit. But it was on the most awful day of that awful time, on the day when ruin and disaster came so near that their shadow fell over London far away; and, without any certain news, the hearts of men failed within them and grew faint; as if the agony of the army in the battlefield had entered into their souls.
On this dreadful day, then, when three hundred thousand men in arms with all their artillery swelled like a flood against the little English company, there was one point above all other points in our battle line that was for a time in awful danger, not merely of defeat, but of utter annihilation. With the permission of the Censorship and of the military expert, this corner may, perhaps, be described as a salient, and if this angle were crushed and broken, then the English force as a whole would be shattered, the Allied left would be turned, and Sedan would inevitably follow.
All the morning the German guns had thundered and shrieked against this corner, and against the thousand or so of men who held it. The men joked at the shells, and found funny names for them, and had bets about them, and greeted them with scraps of music-hall songs. But the shells came on and burst, and tore good Englishmen limb from limb, and tore brother from brother, and as the heat of the day increased so did the fury of that terrific cannonade. There was no help, it seemed. The English artillery was good, but there was not nearly enough of it; it was being steadily battered into scrap iron.
There comes a moment in a storm at sea when people say to one another, “It is at its worst; it can blow no harder,” and then there is a blast ten times more fierce than any before it. So it was in these British trenches.
There were no stouter hearts in the whole world than the hearts of these men; but even they were appalled as this seven-times-heated hell of the German cannonade fell upon them and overwhelmed them and destroyed them. And at this very moment they saw from their trenches that a tremendous host was moving against their lines. Five hundred of the thousand remained, and as far as they could see the German infantry was pressing on against them, column upon column, a grey world of men, ten thousand of them, as it appeared afterwards. There was no hope at all. They shook hands, some of them. One man improvised a new version of the battlesong, “Good-bye, good-bye to Tipperary,” ending with “And we shan’t get there”. And they all went on firing steadily. The officers pointed out that such an opportunity for high-class, fancy shooting might never occur again; the Germans dropped line after line; the Tipperary humorist asked, “What price Sidney Street?” And the few machine guns did their best. But everybody knew it was of no use. The dead grey bodies lay in companies and battalions, as others came on and on and on, and they swarmed and stirred and advanced from beyond and beyond.
“World without end. Amen,” said one of the British soldiers with some irrelevance as he took aim and fired. And then he remembered-he says he cannot think why or wherefore–a queer vegetarian restaurant in London where he had once or twice eaten eccentric dishes of cutlets made of lentils and nuts that pretended to be steak. On all the plates in this restaurant there was printed a figure of St. George in blue, with the motto, Adsit Anglis Sanctus Geogius–May St. George be a present help to the English. This soldier happened to know Latin and other useless things, and now, as he fired at his man in the grey advancing mass–300 yards away–he uttered the pious vegetarian motto. He went on firing to the end, and at last Bill on his right had to clout him cheerfully over the head to make him stop, pointing out as he did so that the King’s ammunition cost money and was not lightly to be wasted in drilling funny patterns into dead Germans.
For as the Latin scholar uttered his invocation he felt something between a shudder and an electric shock pass through his body. The roar of the battle died down in his ears to a gentle murmur; instead of it, he says, he heard a great voice and a shout louder than a thunder-peal crying, “Array, array, array!”
His heart grew hot as a burning coal, it grew cold as ice within him, as it seemed to him that a tumult of voices answered to his summons. He heard, or seemed to hear, thousands shouting: “St. George! St. George!”
“Ha! messire; ha! sweet Saint, grant us good deliverance!”
“St. George for merry England!”
“Harow! Harow! Monseigneur St. George, succour us.”
“Ha! St. George! Ha! St. George! a long bow and a strong bow.”
“Heaven’s Knight, aid us!”
And as the soldier heard these voices he saw before him, beyond the trench, a long line of shapes, with a shining about them. They were like men who drew the bow, and with another shout their cloud of arrows flew singing and tingling through the air towards the German hosts.
The other men in the trench were firing all the while. They had no hope; but they aimed just as if they had been shooting at Bisley. Suddenly one of them lifted up his voice in the plainest English, “Gawd help us!” he bellowed to the man next to him, “but we’re blooming marvels! Look at those grey… gentlemen, look at them! D’ye see them? They’re not going down in dozens, nor in ‘undreds; it’s thousands, it is. Look! look! there’s a regiment gone while I’m talking to ye.”
“Shut it!” the other soldier bellowed, taking aim, “what are ye gassing about!”
But he gulped with astonishment even as he spoke, for, indeed, the grey men were falling by the thousands. The English could hear the guttural scream of the German officers, the crackle of their revolvers as they shot the reluctant; and still line after line crashed to the earth.
All the while the Latin-bred soldier heard the cry: “Harow! Harow! Monseigneur, dear saint, quick to our aid! St. George help us!”
“High Chevalier, defend us!”
The singing arrows fled so swift and thick that they darkened the air; the heathen horde melted from before them.
“More machine guns!” Bill yelled to Tom.
“Don’t hear them,” Tom yelled back. “But, thank God, anyway; they’ve got it in the neck.”
In fact, there were ten thousand dead German soldiers left before that salient of the English army, and consequently there was no Sedan. In Germany, a country ruled by scientific principles, the Great General Staff decided that the contemptible English must have employed shells containing an unknown gas of a poisonous nature, as no wounds were discernible on the bodies of the dead German soldiers. But the man who knew what nuts tasted like when they called themselves steak knew also that St. George had brought his Agincourt Bowmen to help the English.

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One of the great war poets, friends with Robert Graves, Lawrence and Winifred Owens. His work has always touched me, but I think this is the first time I have put his works on Turfing. I hope you enjoy it, and give some thought to the veterans on Armistice/Veterans Day. A poppy for your thoughts…

-Gwyllm
The Poetry of Siegried Sassoon

Daybreak In a Garden

I heard the farm cocks crowing, loud, and faint, and thin,

When hooded night was going and one clear planet winked:

I heard shrill notes begin down the spired wood distinct,

When cloudy shoals were chinked and gilt with fires of day.

White-misted was the weald; the lawns were silver-grey;

The lark his lonely field for heaven had forsaken;

And the wind upon its way whispered the boughs of may,

And touched the nodding peony-flowers to bid them waken.

—–

Dead Musicians
I
From you, Beethoven, Bach, Mozart,

The substance of my dreams took fire.

You built cathedrals in my heart,

And lit my pinnacled desire.

You were the ardour and the bright

Procession of my thoughts toward prayer.

You were the wrath of storm, the light

On distant citadels aflare.
II
Great names, I cannot find you now

In these loud years of youth that strives

Through doom toward peace: upon my brow

I wear a wreath of banished lives.

You have no part with lads who fought

And laughed and suffered at my side.

Your fugues and symphonies have brought

No memory of my friends who died.
III
For when my brain is on their track,

In slangy speech I call them back.

With fox-trot tunes their ghosts I charm.

‘Another little drink won’t do us any harm.’

I think of rag-time; a bit of rag-time;

And see their faces crowding round

To the sound of the syncopated beat.

They’ve got such jolly things to tell,

Home from hell with a Blighty wound so neat…

. . . .

And so the song breaks off; and I’m alone.

They’re dead … For God’s sake stop that gramophone.

—
Dryads

When meadows are grey with the morn

In the dusk of the woods it is night:

The oak and the birch and the pine

War with the glimmer of light.
Dryads brown as the leaf

Move in the gloom of the glade;

When meadows are grey with the morn

Dim night in the wood has delayed.
The cocks that crow to the land

Are faint and hollow and shrill:

Dryads brown as the leaf

Whisper, and hide, and are still.

—

Idyll

In the grey summer garden I shall find you

With day-break and the morning hills behind you.
There will be rain-wet roses; stir of wings;

And down the wood a thrush that wakes and sings.

Not from the past you’ll come, but from that deep

Where beauty murmurs to the soul asleep:

And I shall know the sense of life re-born

From dreams into the mystery of morn

Where gloom and brightness meet. And standing there

Till that calm song is done, at last we’ll share

The league-spread, quiring symphonies that are

Joy in the world, and peace, and dawn’s one star.

—-

The Last Meeting

I
Because the night was falling warm and still

Upon a golden day at April’s end,

I thought; I will go up the hill once more

To find the face of him that I have lost,

And speak with him before his ghost has flown

Far from the earth that might not keep him long.
So down the road I went, pausing to see

How slow the dusk drew on, and how the folk

Loitered about their doorways, well-content

With the fine weather and the waxing year.

The miller’s house, that glimmered with grey walls,

Turned me aside; and for a while I leaned

Along the tottering rail beside the bridge

To watch the dripping mill-wheel green with damp.

The miller peered at me with shadowed eyes

And pallid face: I could not hear his voice

For sound of the weir’s plunging. He was old.

His days went round with the unhurrying wheel.
Moving along the street, each side I saw

The humble, kindly folk in lamp-lit rooms;

Children at table; simple, homely wives;

Strong, grizzled men; and soldiers back from war,

Scaring the gaping elders with loud talk.
Soon all the jumbled roofs were down the hill,

And I was turning up the grassy lane

That goes to the big, empty house that stands

Above the town, half-hid by towering trees.

I looked below and saw the glinting lights:

I heard the treble cries of bustling life,

And mirth, and scolding; and the grind of wheels.

An engine whistled, piercing-shrill, and called

High echoes from the sombre slopes afar;

Then a long line of trucks began to move.
It was quite still; the columned chestnuts stood

Dark in their noble canopies of leaves.

I thought: ‘A little longer I’ll delay,

And then he’ll be more glad to hear my feet,

And with low laughter ask me why I’m late.

The place will be too dim to show his eyes,

But he will loom above me like a tree,

With lifted arms and body tall and strong.’
There stood the empty house; a ghostly hulk

Becalmed and huge, massed in the mantling dark,

As builders left it when quick-shattering war

Leapt upon France and called her men to fight.

Lightly along the terraces I trod,

Crunching the rubble till I found the door
That gaped in twilight, framing inward gloom.

An owl flew out from under the high eaves

To vanish secretly among the firs,

Where lofty boughs netted the gleam of stars.

I stumbled in; the dusty floors were strewn

With cumbering piles of planks and props and beams;

Tall windows gapped the walls; the place was free

To every searching gust and jousting gale;

But now they slept; I was afraid to speak,

And heavily the shadows crowded in.
I called him, once; then listened: nothing moved:

Only my thumping heart beat out the time.

Whispering his name, I groped from room to room.
Quite empty was that house; it could not hold

His human ghost, remembered in the love

That strove in vain to be companioned still.
II
Blindly I sought the woods that I had known

So beautiful with morning when I came

Amazed with spring that wove the hazel twigs

With misty raiment of awakening green.

I found a holy dimness, and the peace

Of sanctuary, austerely built of trees,

And wonder stooping from the tranquil sky.
Ah! but there was no need to call his name.

He was beside me now, as swift as light.

I knew him crushed to earth in scentless flowers,

And lifted in the rapture of dark pines.

‘For now,’ he said, ‘my spirit has more eyes

Than heaven has stars; and they are lit by love.

My body is the magic of the world,

And dawn and sunset flame with my spilt blood.

My breath is the great wind, and I am filled

With molten power and surge of the bright waves

That chant my doom along the ocean’s edge.
‘Look in the faces of the flowers and find

The innocence that shrives me; stoop to the stream

That you may share the wisdom of my peace.

For talking water travels undismayed.

The luminous willows lean to it with tales

Of the young earth; and swallows dip their wings

Where showering hawthorn strews the lanes of light.
‘I can remember summer in one thought

Of wind-swept green, and deeps of melting blue,

And scent of limes in bloom; and I can hear

Distinct the early mower in the grass,

Whetting his blade along some morn of June.
‘For I was born to the round world’s delight,

And knowledge of enfolding motherhood,

Whose tenderness, that shines through constant toil,

Gathers the naked children to her knees.

In death I can remember how she came

To kiss me while I slept; still I can share

The glee of childhood; and the fleeting gloom

When all my flowers were washed with rain of tears.
‘I triumph in the choruses of birds,

Bursting like April buds in gyres of song.

My meditations are the blaze of noon

On silent woods, where glory burns the leaves.

I have shared breathless vigils; I have slaked

The thirst of my desires in bounteous rain

Pouring and splashing downward through the dark.

Loud storm has roused me with its winking glare,

And voice of doom that crackles overhead.

I have been tired and watchful, craving rest,

Till the slow-footed hours have touched my brows

And laid me on the breast of sundering sleep.’
III
I know that he is lost among the stars,

And may return no more but in their light.

Though his hushed voice may call me in the stir

Of whispering trees, I shall not understand.

Men may not speak with stillness; and the joy

Of brooks that leap and tumble down green hills

Is faster than their feet; and all their thoughts

Can win no meaning from the talk of birds.
My heart is fooled with fancies, being wise;

For fancy is the gleaming of wet flowers

When the hid sun looks forth with golden stare.

Thus, when I find new loveliness to praise,

And things long-known shine out in sudden grace,

Then will I think: ‘He moves before me now.’

So he will never come but in delight,

And, as it was in life, his name shall be

Wonder awaking in a summer dawn,

And youth, that dying, touched my lips to song.
-Flixécourt. May 1916

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Bombay Dub Orchestra Compassion RMX 09

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J.W. Turner -The Angel Standing in the Sun

Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.

-Novalis
Life is swept up in a bit of change, is it not? The winds have tacked to a different direction, and it looks like a bit of sun is there, coming up on the horizon. Maybe the flow of the tide has altered, I would like to think so. I have been out on the streets, and there are lots of smiles going on. Yes, yes, yes.
Click on the Pic

Here is a picture of Rowan casting his first vote on November 4th. He was pretty jazzed about it. His candidates largely took their place in Gov’t, and the Measures he voted for passed. This is in general far better than I ever did. I think as far as presidential candidates, this is my 3rd successful vote in 36 years. 80) Anyway, it looks like we have a sea change; this is not an ending, but a departure point. You can help out, we have had a request via Jim in the UK from Riane Eisler for putting compassionate women in the Obama cabinet. Here is the link: Got Something To Say For Change?
Best wishes on the cusp of things,
Gwyllm

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On The Menu:

The Links

Darwin Quotes

Yma Sumac – Ataypura (remix by kurtigghiu)

Novalis: Hymns to the Night

Novalis Biography

Yma Sumac Chuncho

Art: J.W. Turner

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The Links:

Ginger Baker threatens to get his kit off in court

Is the Bible Sexist?

Kids Halloween Candy Code

The Ice Age Cometh!

__________
Darwin Quotes:

1. “The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic.” (Autobiography)
2. “It seems to me absurd to doubt that a man may be an ardent Theist & an evolutionist.” (Letter to John Fordyce, May 7 1879)
3. “I hardly see how religion & science can be kept as distinct as [Edward Pusey] desires… But I most wholly agree… that there is no reason why the disciples of either school should attack each other with bitterness.” (Letter to J. Brodie Innes, November 27 1878)
4. “In my most extreme fluctuations I have never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God.” (Letter to John Fordyce, May 7 1879)
5. “I think that generally (& more and more so as I grow older) but not always, that an agnostic would be the most correct description of my state of mind.” (Letter to John Fordyce, May 7 1879)
6. “I am sorry to have to inform you that I do not believe in the Bible as a divine revelation, & therefore not in Jesus Christ as the son of God.” (Letter to Frederick McDermott, November 24 1880)
7. [In conversation with the atheist Edward Aveling, 1881] “Why should you be so aggressive? Is anything gained by trying to force these new ideas upon the mass of mankind?” (Edward Aveling, The religious views of Charles Darwin, 1883)
8. “Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?” (Letter to Graham William, July 3 1881)
9. “My theology is a simple muddle: I cannot look at the Universe as the result of blind chance, yet I can see no evidence of beneficent Design.” (Letter to Joseph Hooker, July 12 1870)
10. “I can never make up my mind how far an inward conviction that there must be some Creator or First Cause is really trustworthy evidence.” (Letter to Francis Abbot, September 6 1871)
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Thanks to Peter for the Yma Sumac!

Yma passed away recently. She had some amazing pipes!
Yma Sumac – Ataypura (remix by kurtigghiu)
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Novalis: Hymns to the Night

Before all the wondrous shows of the widespread space around him, what living, sentient thing loves not the all-joyous light — with its colors, its rays and undulations, its gentle omnipresence in the form of the wakening Day? The giant-world of the unresting constellations inhales it as the innermost soul of life, and floats dancing in its blue flood — the sparkling, ever-tranquil stone, the thoughtful, imbibing plant, and the wild, burning multiform beast inhales it — but more, the lordly stranger with the sense-filled eyes, the swaying walk, and the sweetly closed, melodious lips. Like a king over earthly nature, it rouses every force to countless transformations, binds and unbinds innumerable alliances, hangs its heavenly form around every earthly substance. — Its presence alone reveals the marvelous splendor of the kingdoms of the world.
Aside I turn to the holy, unspeakable, mysterious Night. Afar lies the world — sunk in a deep grave — waste and lonely is its place. In the chords of the bosom blows a deep sadness. I am ready to sink away in drops of dew, and mingle with the ashes. — The distances of memory, the wishes of youth, the dreams of childhood, the brief joys and vain hopes of a whole long life, arise in gray garments, like an evening vapor after the sunset. In other regions the light has pitched its joyous tents. What if it should never return to its children, who wait for it with the faith of innocence?
What springs up all at once so sweetly boding in my heart, and stills the soft air of sadness? Dost thou also take a pleasure in us, dark Night? What holdest thou under thy mantle, that with hidden power affects my soul? Precious balm drips from thy hand out of its bundle of poppies. Thou upliftest the heavy-laden wings of the soul. Darkly and inexpressibly are we moved — joy-startled, I see a grave face that, tender and worshipful, inclines toward me, and, amid manifold entangled locks, reveals the youthful loveliness of the Mother. How poor and childish a thing seems to me now the Light — how joyous and welcome the departure of the day — because the Night turns away from thee thy servants, you now strew in the gulfs of space those flashing globes, to proclaim thy omnipotence — thy return — in seasons of thy absence. More heavenly than those glittering stars we hold the eternal eyes which the Night hath opened within us. Farther they see than the palest of those countless hosts — needing no aid from the light, they penetrate the depths of a loving soul — that fills a loftier region with bliss ineffable. Glory to the queen of the world, to the great prophet of the holier worlds, to the guardian of blissful love — she sends thee to me — thou tenderly beloved — the gracious sun of the Night, — now am I awake — for now am I thine and mine — thou hast made me know the Night — made of me a man — consume with spirit-fire my body, that I, turned to finer air, may mingle more closely with thee, and then our bridal night endure forever.

—

2

Must the morning always return? Will the despotism of the earthly never cease? Unholy activity consumes the angel-visit of the Night. Will the time never come when Love’s hidden sacrifice shall burn eternally? To the Light a season was set; but everlasting and boundless is the dominion of the Night. — Endless is the duration of sleep. Holy Sleep — gladden not too seldom in this earthly day-labor, the devoted servant of the Night. Fools alone mistake thee, knowing nought of sleep but the shadow which, in the twilight of the real Night, thou pitifully castest over us. They feel thee not in the golden flood of the grapes — in the magic oil of the almond tree — and the brown juice of the poppy. They know not that it is thou who hauntest the bosom of the tender maiden, and makest a heaven of her lap — never suspect it is thou, opening the doors to Heaven, that steppest to meet them out of ancient stories, bearing the key to the dwellings of the blessed, silent messenger of secrets infinite.

—

3

Once when I was shedding bitter tears, when, dissolved in pain, my hope was melting away, and I stood alone by the barren mound which in its narrow dark bosom hid the vanished form of my life — lonely as never yet was lonely man, driven by anxiety unspeakable — powerless, and no longer anything but a conscious misery. — As there I looked about me for help, unable to go on or to turn back, and clung to the fleeting, extinguished life with an endless longing: — then, out of the blue distances — from the hills of my ancient bliss, came a shiver of twilight — and at once snapt the bond of birth — the chains of the Light. Away fled the glory of the world, and with it my mourning — the sadness flowed together into a new, unfathomable world — Thou, Night-inspiration, heavenly Slumber, didst come upon me — the region gently upheaved itself; over it hovered my unbound, newborn spirit. The mound became a cloud of dust — and through the cloud I saw the glorified face of my beloved. In her eyes eternity reposed — I laid hold of her hands, and the tears became a sparkling bond that could not be broken. Into the distance swept by, like a tempest, thousands of years. On her neck I welcomed the new life with ecstatic tears. It was the first, the only dream — and just since then I have held fast an eternal, unchangeable faith in the heaven of the Night, and its Light, the Beloved.

—

4

Now I know when will come the last morning — when the Light no more scares away Night and Love — when sleep shall be without waking, and but one continuous dream. I feel in me a celestial exhaustion. Long and weariful was my pilgrimage to the holy grave, and crushing was the cross. The crystal wave, which, imperceptible to the ordinary sense, springs in the dark bosom of the mound against whose foot breaks the flood of the world, he who has tasted it, he who has stood on the mountain frontier of the world, and looked across into the new land, into the abode of the Night — truly he turns not again into the tumult of the world, into the land where dwells the Light in ceaseless unrest.
On those heights he builds for himself tabernacles — tabernacles of peace, there longs and loves and gazes across, until the welcomest of all hours draws him down into the waters of the spring — afloat above remains what is earthly, and is swept back in storms, but what became holy by the touch of love, runs free through hidden ways to the region beyond, where, like fragrances, it mingles with love asleep.
Still wakest thou, cheerful Light, that weary man to his labor — and into me pourest joyous life — but thou wilest me not away from Memory’s moss-grown monument. Gladly will I stir busy hands, everywhere behold where thou hast need of me — praise the lustre of thy splendor — pursue unwearied the lovely harmonies of thy skilled handicraft — gladly contemplate the clever pace of thy mighty, luminous clock — explore the balance of the forces and the laws of the wondrous play of countless worlds and their seasons. But true to the Night remains my secret heart, and to creative Love, her daughter. Canst thou show me a heart eternally true? has thy sun friendly eyes that know me? do thy stars lay hold of my longing hand? and return me the tender pressure and the caressing word? was it thou did adorn them with colors and a flickering outline — or was it she who gave to thy jewels a higher, a dearer weight? What delight, what pleasure offers thy life, to outweigh the transports of Death? Wears not everything that inspires us the color of the Night? She sustains thee mother-like, and to her thou owest all thy glory. Thou wouldst vanish into thyself — in boundless space thou wouldst dissolve, if she did not hold thee fast, if she swaddled thee not, so that thou grewest warm, and flaming, begot the universe. Truly I was, before thou wast — the mother sent me with my brothers and sisters to inhabit thy world, to hallow it with love that it might be an ever-present memorial — to plant it with flowers unfading. As yet they have not ripened, these thoughts divine — as yet is there small trace of our coming revelation — One day thy clock will point to the end of time, and then thou shalt be as one of us, and shalt, full of ardent longing, be extinguished and die. I feel in me the close of thy activity — heavenly freedom, and blessed return. With wild pangs I recognize thy distance from our home, thy resistance against the ancient, glorious heaven. Thy rage and thy raving are in vain. Unscorchable stands the cross — victory-banner of our breed.
Over I journey

And for each pain

A pleasant sting only

Shall one day remain.

Yet in a few moments

Then free am I,

And intoxicated

In Love’s lap lie.

Life everlasting

Lifts, wave-like, at me,

I gaze from its summit

Down after thee.

Your lustre must vanish

Yon mound underneath –

A shadow will bring thee

Thy cooling wreath.

Oh draw at my heart, love,

Draw till I’m gone,

That, fallen asleep, I

Still may love on.

I feel the flow of

Death’s youth-giving flood

To balsam and ether

Transform my blood –

I live all the daytime

In faith and in might

And in holy fire

I die every night.

—

5

In ancient times, over the widespread families of men an iron Fate ruled with dumb force. A gloomy oppression swathed their heavy souls — the earth was boundless — the abode of the gods and their home. From eternal ages stood its mysterious structure. Beyond the red hills of the morning, in the sacred bosom of the sea, dwelt the sun, the all-enkindling, living Light. An aged giant upbore the blissful world. Fast beneath mountains lay the first-born sons of mother Earth. Helpless in their destroying fury against the new, glorious race of gods, and their kindred, glad-hearted men. The ocean’s dark green abyss was the lap of a goddess. In crystal grottos revelled a luxuriant folk. Rivers, trees, flowers, and beasts had human wits. Sweeter tasted the wine — poured out by Youth-abundance — a god in the grape-clusters — a loving, motherly goddess upgrew in the full golden sheaves — love’s sacred inebriation was a sweet worship of the fairest of the god-ladies — Life rustled through the centuries like one spring-time, an ever-variegated festival of heaven-children and earth-dwellers. All races childlike adored the ethereal, thousand-fold flame as the one sublimest thing in the world. There was but one notion, a horrible dream-shape –
That fearsome to the merry tables strode,

A wrapt the spirit there in wild fright.

The gods themselves no counsel knew nor showed

To fill the anxious hearts with comfort light.

Mysterious was the monster’s pathless road,

Whose rage no prayer nor tribute could requite;

‘Twas Death who broke the banquet up with fears,

With anguish, dire pain, and bitter tears.
Eternally from all things here disparted

That sway the heart with pleasure’s joyous flow,

Divided from the loved ones who’ve departed,

Tossed by longing vain, unceasing woe –

In a dull dream to struggle, faint and thwarted,

Seemed all was granted to the dead below.

Broke lay the merry wave of human bliss

On Death’s inevitable, rocky cliff.
With daring spirit and a passion deep,

Did man ameliorate the horrid blight,

A gentle youth puts out his torch, to sleep –

The end, just like a harp’s sigh, comes light.

Cool shadow-floods o’er melting memory creep,

So sang the song, into its sorry need.

Still undeciphered lay the endless Night –

The solemn symbol of a far-off might.
The old world began to decline. The pleasure-garden of the young race withered away — up into more open, desolate regions, forsaking his childhood, struggled the growing man. The gods vanished with their retinue — Nature stood alone and lifeless. Dry Number and rigid Measure bound it with iron chains. Into dust and air the priceless blossoms of life fell away in words obscure. Gone was wonder-working Faith, and its all-transforming, all-uniting angel-comrade, the Imagination. A cold north wind blew unkindly over the rigid plain, and the rigid wonderland first froze, then evaporated into ether. The far depths of heaven filled with glowing worlds. Into the deeper sanctuary, into the more exalted region of feeling, the soul of the world retired with all its earthly powers, there to rule until the dawn should break of universal Glory. No longer was the Light the abode of the gods, and the heavenly token of their presence — they drew over themselves the veil of the Night. The Night became the mighty womb of revelations — into it the gods went back — and fell asleep, to go abroad in new and more glorious shapes over the transfigured world. Among the people who too early were become of all the most scornful and insolently estranged from the blessed innocence of youth, appeared the New World with a face never seen before — in the poverty of a poetic shelter — a son of the first virgin and mother — the eternal fruit of mysterious embrace. The foreboding, rich-blossoming wisdom of the East at once recognized the beginning of the new age — A star showed the way to the humble cradle of the king. In the name of the distant future, they did him homage with lustre and fragrance, the highest wonders of Nature. In solitude the heavenly heart unfolded to a flower-chalice of almighty love — upturned toward the supreme face of the father, and resting on the bliss-foreboding bosom of the sweetly solemn mother. With deifying fervor the prophetic eye of the blooming child beheld the years to come, foresaw, untroubled over the earthly lot of his own days, the beloved offspring of his divine stem. Ere long the most childlike souls, by true love marvellously possessed, gathered about him. Like flowers sprang up a strange new life in his presence. Words inexhaustible and the most joyful tidings fell like sparks of a divine spirit from his friendly lips. From a far shore, born under the clear sky of Hellas, came a singer to Palestine, and gave up his whole heart to the wonder-child:
The youth thou art who ages long hast stood

Upon our graves, so deeply lost in thought;

A sign of comfort in the dusky gloom

For high humanity, a joyful start.

What dropped us all into abyssmal woe,

Pulls us forward with sweet yearning now.

In everlasting life death found its goal,

For thou art Death who at last makes us whole.
Filled with joy, the singer went on to Hindustan — his heart intoxicated with the sweetest love; and poured it out in fiery songs under the balmy sky, so that a thousand hearts bowed to him, and the good news sprang up with a thousand branches. Soon after the singer’s departure, his precious life was made a sacrifice for the deep fall of man — He died in his youth, torn away from his beloved world, from his weeping mother, and his trembling friends. His lovely mouth emptied the dark cup of unspeakable woes — in ghastly fear the birth of the new world drew near. Hard he wrestled with the terrors of old Death — Heavy lay the weight of the old world upon him. Yet once more he looked fondly at his mother — then came the releasing hand of eternal love, and he fell asleep. Only a few days hung a deep veil over the roaring sea, over the quaking land — countless tears wept his loved ones — the mystery was unsealed — heavenly spirits heaved the ancient stone from the gloomy grave. Angels sat by the Sleeper — delicately shaped from his dreams — awoken in new Godlike glory; he clomb the limits of the new-born world — buried with his own hand the old corpse in the abandoned hollow, and with a hand almighty laid upon it a stone which no power shall ever again upheave.
Yet weep thy loved ones tears of joy, tears of feeling and endless thanksgiving over your grave — joyously startled, they see thee rise again, and themselves with thee — behold thee weep with sweet fervor on the blessed bosom of thy mother, solemnly walking with thy friends, uttering words plucked as from the Tree of Life; see thee hasten, full of longing, into thy father’s arms, bearing with thee youthful humanity, and the inexhaustible cup of the golden future. Soon the mother hastened after thee — in heavenly triumph — she was the first with thee in the new home. Since then, long ages have flowed past, and in ever-increasing splendor have stirred your new creation — and thousands have, away from pangs and tortures, followed thee, filled with faith and longing and fidelity — walking about with thee and the heavenly virgin in the kingdom of love, serving in the temple of heavenly Death, and forever thine.
Uplifted is the stone –

And all mankind is risen –

We all remain thine own.

And vanished is our prison.

All troubles flee away

Thy golden bowl before,

For Earth and Life give way

At the last and final supper.
To the marriage Death doth call –

The virgins standeth back –

The lamps burn lustrous all –

Of oil there is no lack –

If the distance would only fill

With the sound of you walking alone

And that the stars would call

Us all with human tongues and tone.
Unto thee, O Mary

A thousand hearts aspire.

In this life of shadows

Thee only they desire.

In thee they hope for delivery

With visionary expectation –

If only thou, O holy being

Could clasp them to thy breast.
With bitter torment burning,

So many who are consumed

At last from this world turning

To thee have looked and fled,

Helpful thou hast appeared
To so many in pain.

Now to them we come,

To never go out again.
At no grave can weep

Any who love and pray.

The gift of Love they keep,

From none can it be taken away.

To soothe and quiet his longing,

Night comes and inspires –

Heaven’s children round him thronging

Watch and guard his heart.
Have courage, for life is striding

To endless life along;

Stretched by inner fire,

Our sense becomes transfigured.

One day the stars above

Shall flow in golden wine,

We will enjoy it all,

And as stars we will shine.
The love is given freely,

And Separation is no more.

The whole life heaves and surges

Like a sea without a shore.

Just one night of bliss –

One everlasting poem –

And the sun we all share

Is the face of God.

—
6

Longing for Death
Into the bosom of the earth,

Out of the Light’s dominion,

Death’s pains are but a bursting forth,

Sign of glad departure.

Swift in the narrow little boat,

Swift to the heavenly shore we float.
Blessed be the everlasting Night,

And blessed the endless slumber.

We are heated by the day too bright,

And withered up with care.

We’re weary of a life abroad,

And we now want our Father’s home.
What in this world should we all

Do with love and with faith?

That which is old is set aside,

And the new may perish also.

Alone he stands and sore downcast

Who loves with pious warmth the Past.
The Past where the light of the senses

In lofty flames did rise;

Where the Father’s face and hand

All men did recognize;

And, with high sense, in simplicity

Many still fit the original pattern.
The Past wherein, still rich in bloom,

Man’s strain did burgeon glorious,

And children, for the world to come,

Sought pain and death victorious,

And, through both life and pleasure spake,

Yet many a heart for love did break.
The Past, where to the flow of youth

God still showed himself,

And truly to an early death

Did commit his sweet life.

Fear and torture patiently he bore

So that he would be loved forever.
With anxious yearning now we see

That Past in darkness drenched,

With this world’s water never we

Shall find our hot thirst quenched.

To our old home we have to go

That blessed time again to know.
What yet doth hinder our return

To loved ones long reposed?

Their grave limits our lives.

We are all sad and afraid.

We can search for nothing more –

The heart is full, the world is void.
Infinite and mysterious,

Thrills through us a sweet trembling –

As if from far there echoed thus

A sigh, our grief resembling.

Our loved ones yearn as well as we,

And sent to us this longing breeze.
Down to the sweet bride, and away

To the beloved Jesus.

Have courage, evening shades grow gray

To those who love and grieve.

A dream will dash our chains apart,

And lay us in the Father’s lap.

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Biography of Novalis
Georg Friedrich Philipp von Hardenburg (wrote under the pen name of Novalis) was born in Oberwiederstedt, Prussian Saxony, into a family of Protestant Lower Saxon nobility. His father was a director of a salt mine. At the age of tset of six prose and verse lyrics first published in 1800 in Athenaeum, a literary magazine edited by August Wilhelm Schlegel and his brother Friedrich Schlegel. Seven months after the publication of Hymns to the Night, Novalis died of tuberculosis, the same disease that had claimed his fiancé. .. en Novalis was sent to a religious school but he did not adjust to its strict discipline. For some time Novalis lived with his uncle, grandseigneur, who opened him doors to French rationalism and culture. He then went to Weissenfels, where his father moved, and entered the Eisleben gymnasium. In 1790-91 he studied law at the University of Jena, where he met Friedrich von Schiller and Friedrich Schlegel. Novalis completed his studies at Wittenberg in 1793. The ideas of the French Revolution spread through Germany and Novalis dreamt of time when the “walls of Jericho” tumble down. Goethe’s book Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, which he read in 1795, influenced his deeply; he considered it the Bible for the “new age.” In 1795-96 he studied the works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte. At the age of 21 he moved to Tennstädt and took up job in civil sevice.
In 1798 Novalis published a series of philosophical fragments, FRAGMENTEN. Novalis’ only finished collection of poems, HYMNEN AN DIE NACHT (1800), was dedicated to his first great love Sophie von Kühn, who died in 1797. The death of his young fiancé, Sophie von Kühn, led him to write Hymnen an die Nacht (Hymns to the Night), a set

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Yma Sumac Chuncho

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J.W. Turner – Luxemborg City

Tintern Abbey – Samuel Colman

Maybe I am just high on all of the recent events and what, but I have a sense of elation, and hope and that old fear running through the neural passages all at once. (or is he off his meds? 80} ) I feel like I am on the edge of something new in time….
There is so much beauty yet to uncover, and for the young ones coming up, a bright, bright beautiful psychedelic future, almost perfectly encapsulated by our featured musical artist today: MGMT
We cover some older tales, back to ancient Ireland, and then a couple of quick takes on some of the elders that helped get us here today….
May you who live in the US go out and VOTE, and may the best candidate for our futures win.
Bright Blessings,

Gwyllm

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On The Menu:

Allen Ginsberg Quotes

MGMT -Electric Feel

MGMT – Mental Mystics

Cuchulain of Muirthemne: Cruachan

And now a special poem from Allen Ginsberg..

Ken Kesey on Neal Cassady

MGMT “Kids” Video

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Allen Ginsberg Quotes:
Poets are Damned… but See with the Eyes of Angels.
The fact to which we have got to cling, as to a lifebelt, is that it is possible to be a normal decent person and yet be fully alive.
The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That’s what poetry does.
The weight of the world is love. Under the burden of solitude, under the burden of dissatisfaction.
Ultimately Warhol’s private moral reference was to the supreme kitsch of the Catholic church.
Whoever controls the media, the images, controls the culture.
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MGMT -Electric Feel

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Interview:

MGMT – Mental Mystics…

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Cuchulain of Muirthemne: Cruachan
Now as to Cruachan, the home of Ailell and of Maeve, it is on the plain of Magh Ai it was, in the province of Connaught.
And this is the way the plain came by its name. In the time long ago, there was a king whose name was Conn, that had the Druid power, so that when the Sidhe themselves came against him, he was able to defend himself with enchantments as good as their own. And one time he went out against them, and broke up their houses, and carried away their cattle, and then, to hinder them from following after him, he covered the whole province with a deep snow.
The Sidhe went then to consult with Dalach, the king’s brother, that had the Druid knowledge even better than himself; and it is what he told them to do, to kill three hundred white cows with red ears, and to spread out their livers on a certain plain. And when they had done this, he made spells on them, and the heat the livers gave out melted the snow over the whole plain and the whole province, and after that the plain was given the name of Magh Ai, the Plain of the Livers.
Ailell was son of Ross Ruadh, king of Leinster, and Maeve was daughter of Eochaid, king of Ireland, and her brothers were the Three Fair Twins that rose up against their father, and fought against him at Druim Criadh. And they were beaten in the fight, and went back over the Sionnan, and they were overtaken and their heads were cut off, and brought back to their father, and he fretted after them to the end of his life.
Seven sons Ailell and Maeve had, and the name of every one of them was Maine. There was Maine Mathremail, like his mother, and Maine Athremail, like his father, and Maine Mo Epert, the Talker, and Maine Milscothach, the Honey-Worded, and Maine Andoe the Quick, and Maine Mingor, the Gently Dutiful, and Maine Morgor, the Very Dutiful. Their own people they had, and their own place of living.
This now was the appearance of Cruachan, the Royal house of Ailell and of Maeve, that some called Cruachan of the poets; there were seven divisions in the house, with couches in them, from the hearth to the wall; a front of bronze to every division, and of red yew with carvings on it; and there were seven strips of bronze from the foundation to the roof of the house. The house was made of oak, and the roof was covered with oak shingles; sixteen windows with glass there were, and shutters of bronze on them, and a bar of bronze across every shutter. There was a raised place in the middle of the house for Ailell and Maeve, with silver fronts and strips of bronze around it, and four bronze pillars on it, and a silver rod beside it, the way Ailell and Maeve could strike the middle beam and check their people.
And outside the royal house was the dun, with the walls about it that were built by Brocc, son of Blar, and the great gate; and it is there the houses were for strangers to be lodged.
And besides this, there was at Cruachan the Hill of the Sidhe, or, as some called it, the Cave of Cruachan. It was there Midhir brought Etain one time, and it is there the people of the Sidhe lived; but it is seldom any living person had the power to see them.
It is out of that hill a flock of white birds came one time, and everything they touched in all Ireland withered up, until at last the men of Ulster killed them with their slings. And another time enchanted pigs came out of the hill, and in every place they trod, neither corn nor grass nor leaf would sprout before the end of seven years, and no sort of weapon would wound them. But if they were counted in any place, or if the people so much as tried to count them, they would not stop in that place, but they would go on to another. But however often the people of the country tried to count them, no two people could ever make out the one number, and one man would call out, “There are three pigs in it,” and another, “No, but there are seven,” and another that it was eleven were in it, or thirteen, and so the count would be lost. One time Maeve and Ailell themselves tried to count them on the plain, but while they were doing it, one of the pigs made a leap over Maeve’s chariot, and she in it. Every one called out, “A pig has gone over you, Maeve!” “It has not,” she said, and with that she caught hold of the pig by the shank, but if she did, its skin opened at the head, and it made its escape. And it is from that the place was called Magh-mucrimha, the Plain of Swine-counting.
Another time Fraech, son of Idath, of the men of Connaught, that was son of Boann’s sister, Befind, from the Sidhe, came to Cruachan. He was the most beautiful of the men of Ireland or of Alban, but his life was not long. It was to ask Findabair for his wife he came, and before he set out his people said: “Send a message to your mother’s people, the way they will send you clothing of the Sidhe.” So he went to Boann, that was at Magh Breagh, and he brought away fifty blue cloaks with four black ears on each cloak, and a brooch of red gold with each, and pale white shirts with looped beasts of gold around them; and fifty silver shields with edges, and a candle of a king’s house in the hand of each of the men, knobs of carbuncle under them, and their points of precious stones. They used to light up the night as if they were sun’s rays.
And he had with him seven trumpeters with gold and silver trumpets, with many coloured clothing, with golden, silken, heads of hair, with coloured cloaks; and three harpers with the appearance of a king on each of them, every harper having the white skin of a deer about him and a cloak of white linen, and a harp-bag of the skins of water-dogs.
The watchman saw them from the dun when they had come into the Plain of Cruachan. “I see a great crowd,” he said, “coming towards us. Since Ailell was king and Maeve was queen, there never came and there never will come a grander or more beautiful crowd than this one. It is like as if I had my head in a vat of wine, with the breeze that goes over them.”
Then Fraech’s people let out their hounds, and the hounds found seven deer and seven foxes and seven hares and seven wild boars, and hunted them to Rath Cruachan, and there they were killed on the lawn of the dun.
Then Ailell and Maeve gave them a welcome, and they were brought into the house, and while food was being made ready, Maeve sat down to play a game of chess with Fraech. It was a beautiful chess-board they had, all of white bronze, and the chessmen of gold and silver, and a candle of precious stones lighting them.
Then Ailell said: “Let your harpers play for us while the feast is being made ready.” “Let them play, indeed,” said Fraech.
So the harpers began to play, and it was much that the people of the house did not die with crying and with sadness. And the music they played was the Three Cries of Uaithne. It was Uaithne, the harp of the Dagda, that first played those cries the time Boann’s sons were born. The first was a song of sorrow for the hardness of her pains, and the second was a song of smiling and joy for the birth of her sons, and the third was a sleeping song after the birth.
And with the music of the harpers, and with the light that shone from the precious stones in the house, they did not know the night was on them, till at last Maeve started up, and she said: “We have done a great deed to keep these young men without food.” “It is more you think of chess-playing than of providing for them,” said Ailell; “and now, let them stop from the music,” he said, “till the food is given out.”
Then the food was divided. It was Lothar used to be sitting on the floor of the house, dividing the food with his cleaver, and he not eating himself, and from the time he began dividin
g, food never failed under his hand.
After that, Fraech was brought into the conversation-house, and they asked him what was it he wanted.
“A visit to yourselves,” he said, but he said nothing of Findabair. So they told him he was welcome, and he stopped with them for a while, and every day they went out hunting, and all the people of Connaught used to come and to be looking at them.
But all this time Fraech got no chance of speaking with Findabair, until one morning at daybreak, he went down to the river for washing, and Findabair and her young girls had gone there before him. And he took her hand, and he said: “Stay here and talk with me, for it is for your sake I am come, and would you go away with me secretly?” “I will not go secretly,” she said, “for I am the daughter of a king and of a queen.”
So she went from him then, but she left him a ring to remember her by. It was a ring her mother had given her.
Then Fraech went to the conversation-house to Ailell and to Maeve. “Will you give your daughter to me?” he said. “We will give her if you will give the marriage portion we ask,” said Ailell, “and that is, sixty black-grey horses with golden bits, and twelve milch cows, and a white red-eared calf with each of them; and you to come with us with all your strength and all your musicians at whatever time we go to war in Ulster.” “I swear by my shield and my sword, I would not give that for Maeve herself,” he said; and he went away out of the house.
But Ailell had taken notice of Findabair’s ring with Fraech, and he said to Maeve: “If he brings our daughter away with him, we will lose the help of many of the kings of Ireland. Let us go after him and make an end of him before he has time to harm us.” “That would be a pity,” said Maeve, “and it would be a reproach on us.” “It will be no reproach on us, the way I will manage it,” said he. And Maeve agreed to it, for there was vexation on her that it was Findabair that Fraech wanted, and not herself. So they went into the palace, and Ailell said: “Let us go and see the hounds hunting until mid-day.” So they did so, and at mid-day they were tired, and they all went to bathe in the river. And Fraech was swimming in the river, and Ailell said to him: “Do not come back till you bring me a branch of the rowan-tree there beyond, with the beautiful berries.” For he knew there was a prophecy that it was in a river Fraech would get his death.
So he went and broke a branch off the tree and brought it back over the water, and it is beautiful he looked over the black water, his body without fault, and his face so nice, and his eyes very grey, and the branch with the red berries between the throat and white face. And then he threw the branch to them out of the water. “It is ripe and beautiful the berries are,” said Ailell; “bring us more of them.”
So he went off again to the tree, and the water-worm guarded the tree caught a hold of him. “Let me have a sword,” called out, but there was not a man on the land would dare to give it to him, through fear of Ailell and of Maeve. But Findabair made a leap to go into the water with a gold knife she had in her hand but Ailell threw a sharp-pointed spear from above, through her plaited hair, that held her; but she threw the knife to Fraech, and he cut off the head of the monster, and brought it with him to land, but he himself had got a deep wound. Then Ailell and Maeve went back to the house. “It is a great deed we have done,” said Maeve. “It is a pity, indeed, what we have done to the man,” said Ailell “And let a healing-bath be made for him now,” he said, “of the marrow of pigs and of a heifer.” Fraech was put in the bath then, and pleasant music was played by the trumpeters, and a bed was made for him.
Then a sorrowful crying was heard on Cruachan, and they saw three times fifty women with purple gowns, with green head-dresses, and pins of silver on their wrists, and a messenger went and I asked them who was it they were crying for “For Fraech, son of Idath,” they said, “boy darling of the king of the Sidhe of Ireland”
Then Fraech heard their crying, and he said: “Lift me out of this, for that is the cry of my mother, and of the women of Boann.” So they lifted him out, and the women came round him and brought him away into the Hill of Cruachan.
And the next day he came out, and he whole and sound, and fifty women with him, and they with the appearance of women of the Sidhe. And at the door of the dun they left him, and they gave out their cry again, so that all the people that heard it could not but feel sorrowful. It is from this the musicians of Ireland learned the sorrowful cry of the women of the Sidhe.
And when he went into the house, the whole household rose up before him and bade him welcome, as if it was from another world he was come. And there was shame and repentance on Ailell and on Maeve for trying to harm him, and peace was made, and he went away to his own place.
And it was after that he came to help Ailell and Maeve, and that he got his death in a river as was foretold, at the beginning of the war for the Brown Bull of Cuailgne.
And one time the Hill was robbed by the men of Cruachan, and this is the way it happened.
One night at Samhain, Ailell and Maeve were in Cruachan with their whole household, and the food was being made ready.
Two prisoners had been hanged by them the day before, and Ailell said: “Whoever will put a gad round the foot of either of the two men on the gallows, will get a prize from me.”
It was a very dark night, and bad things would always appear on that night of Samhain, and every man that went out to try came back very quickly into the house. “I will go if I will get a prize,” said Nera, then. “I will give you this gold-hilted sword,” said Ailell.
So Nera went out and he put a gad round the foot of one of the men that had been hanged. Then the man spoke to him. “It is good courage you have,” he said, “and bring me with you where I can get a drink, for I was very thirsty when I was hanged.” So Nera brought him where he would get a drink, and then he put him on the gallows again, and went back to Cruachan.
But what he saw was the whole of the palace as if on fire before him, and the heads of the people of it lying on the ground, and then he thought he saw an army going into the Hill of Cruachan, and he followed after the army. “There is a man on our track,” the last man said. “The track is the heavier,” said the next to him, and each said that word to the other from the last to the first. Then they went into the Hill of Cruachan. And they said to their king: “What shall be done to the man that is come in?” “Let him come here till I speak with him,” said the king. So Nera came, and the king asked him who it was had brought him in. “I came in with your army,” said Nera. “Go to that house beyond,” said the king: “there is a woman there will make you welcome. Tell her it is I myself sent you to her. And come every day,” he said, “to this house with a load of firing.”
So Nera went where he was told, and the woman said: “A welcome before you, if it is the king sent you.” So he stopped there, and took the woman for his wife. And every day for three days he brought a load of firing to the king’s house, and on each day he saw a blind man, and a lame man on his back, coming out of the house before him. They would go on till they were at the brink of a well before the Hill. “Is it there?” the blind man would say. “It is, indeed,” the lame man would say. “Let us go away,” the lame man would say then.
And at the end of three days, as he t
hought, Nera asked the Woman about this. “Why do the blind man and the lame man go every day to the well?” he said. “They go to know is the crown safe that is in the well. It is there the king’s crown is kept.” “Why do these two go?” said Nera. “It is easy to tell that,” she said; “they are trusted by the king to visit the crown, and one of them was blinded by him, and the other was lamed. And another thing,” she said, “go now and give a warning to your people to mind themselves next Samhain night, unless they will come to attack the hill, for it is only at Samhain,” she said, “the army of the Sidhe can go out, for it is at that time all the hills of the Sidhe of Ireland are opened. But if they will come, I will promise them this, the crown of Briun to be carried off by Ailell and by Maeve.”
“How can I give them that message,” said Nera, “when I saw the whole dun of Cruachan burned and destroyed, and all the people destroyed with it?” “You did not see that, indeed,” she said “It was the host of the Sidhe came and put that appearance before your eyes. And go back to them now,” she said, “and you will find them sitting round the same great pot, and the meat has not yet been taken off the fire.”
“How will it be believed that I have gone into the Hill?” said Nera. “Bring flowers of summer with you,” said the woman. So he brought wild garlic with him, and primroses and golden fern.
So he went back to the palace, and he found his people round the same great pot, and he told them all that had happened him, and the sword was given to him, and he stopped with his people to the end of a year.
At the end of the year Ailell said to Nera: “We are going now against the Hill of the Sidhe, and let you go back,” he said, “if you have anything to bring out of it.” So he went back to see the woman, and she bade him welcome. “Go now,” she said, “and bring in a load of firing to the king, for I went in myself every day for the last year with the load on my back, and I said there was sickness on you.” So he did that.
Then the men of Connaught and the black host of the exiles of Ulster went into the Hill and robbed it and brought away the crown of Briun, son of Smetra, that was made by the smith of Angus, son of Umor, and that was kept in the well at Cruachan, to save it from the Morrigu. And Nera was left with his people in the hill, and he has not come out till now, and he will not come out till the end of life and time.
Now one time the Morrigu brought away a cow from the Hill of Cruachan to the Brown Bull of Cuailgne, and after she brought it back again its calf was born. And one day it went out of the Hill, and it bellowed three times. At that time Ailell and Fergus were playing draughts, for it was after Fergus had come as an exile from Ulster, because of the death of the sons of Usnach, and they heard the bellowing of the bull-calf in the plain. Then Fergus said: “I do not like the sound of the calf bellowing. There will be calves without cows,” he said, “when the king goes on his march.”
But now Ailell’s bull, Finbanach, the White-Horned, met the calf in the plain of Cruachan, and they fought together, and the calf was beaten and it bellowed. “What did the calf bellow?” Maeve asked her cow-herd Buaigle. “I know that, my master, Fergus,” said Bricriu. “It is the song that you were singing a while ago.” On that Fergus turned and struck with his fist at his head, so that the five men of the chessmen that were in his hand went into Bricriu’s head, and it was a lasting hurt to him. “Tell me now, Buaigle, what did the calf bellow?” said Maeve. “It said indeed,” said Buaigle, “that if its father the Brown Bull of Cuailgne would come to fight with the White-Horned, he would not be seen any more in Ai, he would be beaten through the whole plain of Ai on every side.” And it is what Maeve said: “I swear by the gods my people swear by, I will not lie down on feathers, or drink red or white ale, till I see those two bulls fighting before my face.”

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And now a special poem from Allen Ginsberg…

A poem written as an aftermath of a cosmic voyage…

—

I stumbled upon this poem whilst reading ‘Albion Rising’(A popular history LSD in Britain) written by Andy Roberts… It was midnight, and I went into the living room and snagged the Allen Ginsberg collected off the shelf and made my way to bed. I think midnight is a magick moment anyway, and reading this poem absolutely transformed my consciousness. I find it incredibly evocative of that state of spiritual bliss…

-Gwyllm

Wales Visitation
White fog lifting &amp; falling on mountain-brow

Trees moving in rivers of wind

The clouds arise

as on a wave, gigantic eddy lifting mist

above teeming ferns exquisitely swayed

along a green crag

glimpsed thru mullioned glass in valley raine—
Bardic, O Self, Visitacione, tell naught

but what seen by one man in a vale in Albion,

of the folk, whose physical sciences end in Ecology,

the wisdom of earthly relations,

of mouths &amp; eyes interknit ten centuries visible

orchards of mind language manifest human,

of the satanic thistle that raises its horned symmetry

flowering above sister grass-daisies’ pink tiny

bloomlets angelic as lightbulbs—
Remember 160 miles from London’s symmetrical thorned tower

&amp; network of TV pictures flashing bearded your Self

the lambs on the tree-nooked hillside this day bleating

heard in Blake’s old ear, &amp; the silent thought of Wordsworth in eld Stillness

clouds passing through skeleton arches of Tintern Abbey—

Bard Nameless as the Vast, babble to Vastness!
All the Valley quivered, one extended motion, wind

undulating on mossy hills

a giant wash that sank white fog delicately down red runnels

on the mountainside

whose leaf-branch tendrils moved asway

in granitic undertow down—

and lifted the floating Nebulous upward, and lifted the arms of the trees

and lifted the grasses an instant in balance

and lifted the lambs to hold still

and lifted the green of the hill, in one solemn wave
A solid mass of Heaven, mist-infused, ebbs thru the vale,

a wavelet of Immensity, lapping gigantic through Llanthony Valley,

the length of all England, valley upon valley under Heaven’s ocean

tonned with cloud-hang,

—Heaven balanced on a grassblade.

Roar of the mountain wind slow, sigh of the body,

One Being on the mountainside stirring gently

Exquisite scales trembling everywhere in balance,

one motion thru the cloudy sky-floor shifting on the million feet of daisies,

one Majesty the motion that stirred wet grass quivering

to the farthest tendril of white fog poured down

through shivering flowers on the mountain’s head—
No imperfection in the budded mountain,

Valleys breathe, heaven and earth move together,

daisies push inches of yellow air, vegetables tremble,

grass shimmers green

sheep speckle the mountainside, revolving their jaws with empty eyes,

horses dance in the warm rain,

tree-lined canals network live farmland,

blueberries fringe stone walls on hawthorn’d hills,

pheasants croak on meadows haired with fern—
Out, out on the hillside, into the ocean sound, into delicate gusts of wet air,

Fall on the ground, O great Wetness, O Mother, No harm on your body!

Stare close, no imperfection in the grass,

each flower Buddha-eye, repeating the story,

myriad-formed—

Kneel before the foxglove raising green buds, mauve bells dropped

doubled down the stem trembling antennae,

&amp; look in the eyes of the branded lambs that stare

breathing stockstill under dripping hawthorn—

I lay down mixing my beard with the wet hair of the mountainside,

smelling the brown vagina-moist ground, harmless,

tasting the violet thistle-hair, sweetness—

One being so balanced, so vast, that its softest breath

moves every floweret in the stillness on the valley floor,

trembles lamb-hair hung gossamer rain-beaded in the grass,

lifts trees on their roots, birds in the great draught

hiding their strength in the rain, bearing same weight,
Groan thru breast and neck, a great Oh! to earth heart

Calling our Presence together

The great secret is no secret

Senses fit the winds,

Visible is visible,

rain-mist curtains wave through the bearded vale,

gray atoms wet the wind’s kabbala

Crosslegged on a rock in dusk rain,

rubber booted in soft grass, mind moveless,

breath trembles in white daisies by the roadside,

Heaven breath and my own symmetric

Airs wavering thru antlered green fern

drawn in my navel, same breath as breathes thru Capel-Y-Ffn,

Sounds of Aleph and Aum

through forests of gristle,

my skull and Lord Hereford’s Knob equal,

All Albion one.
What did I notice? Particulars! The

vision of the great One is myriad—

smoke curls upward from ashtray,

house fire burned low,

The night, still wet &amp; moody black heaven

starless

upward in motion with wet wind.
July 29, 1967 (LSD)—August 3, 1967 (London)

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Ken Kesey on Neal Cassady

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MGMT “Kids” Video

Sent to me by my friend Diana in L.A….
Stand By Me – International Version

What… 9 days to go to the US elections? I don’t believe I have ever been quite so concerned as to the direction a single election could take us, but these are ‘interesting times’. I will not slag McCain, or Palin as I feel they both truly believe that their way is correct. You must give them their due; they are products of a mind-set that has worked remarkably well for over the century or so, even to the detriment of the planet as a whole.
They are the remnants of a tattered meme that exends back to the Neolithic Agrarian Upheaval that brought us priest-craft, organized military, hierarchies and division by class and race…. Which leads one to ask, what is coming then?
If Obama/Biden wins, what does it portend? A major shift surely? I Think I see hints of it; something along the lines of what Riane Eisler, a feminist revisionist of history, coined the term ‘Gylanic Revival’ (GR) in her book The Chalice and the Blade…
We stand at a crossroads, that may determine the fate of our poor beleaguered planet. This is a moment perhaps like no other in the history of the US. We are offered a choice that has been played out ad nauseaum for centuries, and a choice where we move into a world of multi-lateral cooperation, of multi-cultural integration, and a world where we look to the futures needs, a world of bold sacrifice perhaps, but a world made better for those who come after.
On that note, I dream of Shift, of dissolving memes, and of a brave new future.
For Your Enjoyment: (an example of memes that change….)
Wassup – @008

Bright Blessings,

Gwyllm

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On The Menu:

Sufi Quotes

Azam Ali – innal malak

A Curriculum of a School – Idries Shah

A Blessing Of Love: The Poetry Of Rumi

Niyaz – Sadrang

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Sufi Quotes:
Asking good questions is half of learning.

Muhammad (Essential Sufism)
A donkey with a load of holy books is still a donkey.

Traditional (Essential Sufism)
Whatever you have in your mind – forget it;

Whatever you have in your hand – give it;

Whatever is to be your fate – face it!

Abu Sa’id (Essential Sufism)
For every sin but the killing of Time there is forgiveness.

Traditional (Essential Sufism)
If someone remarks: “What an excellent man you are!” and this pleases you more than his saying, “What a bad man you are!” know that you are still a bad man.

Sufyan al Thawri (Essential Sufism)
A seeker went to ask a sage for guidance on the Sufi way.
The sage counseled,
“if you have never trodden the path of love, go away and fall in love;

then come back and see us.”

Jami (Essential Sufism)
“The sun never says to the earth,

‘You owe me.’
Look what happens with a love like that.

It lights up the whole sky.”

The poet Hafiz
“I searched for God and found only myself. I searched for myself and found only God”.

Sufi Proverb

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Azam Ali – innal malak

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A Curriculum of a School

– Idries Shah

“Q: Could you give us a view of the curriculum of a School, from ‘inside the School’ so to speak?”
“A: In our teaching, we must group correctly these elements: the pupils, the teacher and the circumstances of study. Only at the right time and place, with the teacher suitable to these, and with the right body of students, can our studies be said to be capable of coherent development.”
“Does this sound difficult or unreasonable? Let us compare these requirements with an analogy of our needs: the ordinary educational institution.”
“If we are learning, say, physics, we must have a man skilled in physics [having successfully completed his own training; able also to teach; and with a mandate to teach]; students who want to learn and who have capacity and some background for the study; and adequate laboratories and other facilities for the studies to take place.”
“A physics teacher could not make any real progress with a class of idiots, or people who primarily wanted power or fame or gain through physics. These factors would be getting in the way of the teaching. A class of brilliant students, faced with a man who knew no physics, or who only had a smattering, would make little progress. A good teacher, with a student body, could do little unless the instruments and equipment, the building and so on, were available as and when needed.”
“Yet this principle, so well established in conventional studies of all kinds, is largely passed over and has fallen into disuse, among esotericists. Why? Because they have a primitive and unenlightened attitude towards teaching. Like an oaf who has just heard of physics or only seen some of its manifestations, the would-be student wants it all *now*. He does

not care about the necessary presence of other students. He wants to skip the curriculum and he sees no connection between the building and the subject of physics. So he does not want a laboratory.”
“Just observe what happens when people try to carry on learning or teaching without the correct grouping of the three essentials:”
“Would-be students always try to operate their studies with only one, or at the most two, of the three factors. Teachers try to teach those who are unsuitable, because of the difficulties of finding enough people to form a class. Students who have no teacher try to teach themselves. Transpose this into a group of people trying to learn physics, and you will see some of their problems. Others group themselves around the literature and methodology of older schools, trying to make the scrap material of someone else’s physics laboratory work. They formalize rituals, become obsessed by principles and slogans, assign disproportionate importance to the elements which are only tools, but which they regard as a more significant heritage.”
“Anyone can think of several schools, cults, religions, systems of psychology or philosophy which fall into the above classifications.”
“We must categorically affirm that it is impossible to increase human knowledge in the higher field by these methods. The statistical possibility of useful gains within a reasonable time is so remote as to be excluded from one’s calculations.”
“Why, then, do people insist on raking over the embers and looking for truth when they have little chance of finding it? Simply because they are using their conditioning propensity, not their capacity for higher perception, to try to follow the path. There is intellectual stimulus and emotional attraction in the mere effort to plumb the unknown. When the ordinary human mind encounters evidences of a higher state of being, of even when it conceives the possibility of them, it will invariably conclude that there is some possibility of progress for that mind without the application of the factors of teaching-teacher-students-time-and-place which are essentials.”
“Man has few alternatives in his search for truth. He may rely upon his unaided intellect, and gamble that he is capable of perceiving truth or even the way to truth. This is a poor, but an attractive, gamble. Or he can gamble upon the claims of an individual or institution which claims to have such a way. This gamble, too, is a poor one. Aside from a very few, wo/men in general lack a sufficiently developed perception to tell them:”
1. Not to trust their own unaided mentation;

2. Who or what to trust.
“There are, in consequence, two main schools of thought in this matter. Some say ‘Follow your own promptings’; the other says: ‘Trust this or that intuition’. Each is really useless to the ordinary wo/man. Each will help him use up his time.”
“The bitter truth is that before man can know his own inadequacy, or the competence of another man or institution, he must first learn something which will enable him to perceive both. Note well that his perception itself is a product of right study; not of instinct or emotional attraction to the individual, nor yet of desiring to ‘go it alone’. This is ‘Learning How To

Learn.”
“All this means, of course, that we are postulating here the need for preparatory study before school work takes place. We deny that a man can study and properly benefit from school work until he is equipped for it: any more than a person can study space-navigation unless he has a grasp of mathematics.”
“This is not to say that a man (or a woman) cannot have a sensation of truth. But the unorganized and fragmented mind which is most people’s heritage tends to distort the quality and quantity of this sensation, leading to almost completely false conclusions about what can or should be done.”
“This is not to say, either, that man cannot take part in studies and activities which impinge upon that portion of him which is connected with a higher life and cognition. But the mere application of special techniques [often to everyone, regardless of their current state and requirements] will not transform that man’s consciousness. It will only feed into, and disturb, more or less permanently, centers of thought and feeling where it does not belong. Thus it is that something which should be a blessing becomes a curse. Sugar, shall we say, for a normal person is nutritionally useful. To a diabetic, it can be poison.”
“Therefore, before the techniques of study and development are made available to the student, he must be enabled to profit by them in the direction in which they are supposed to lead, not in short-term indulgence.”
“Thus our curriculum takes two parts: the first is in the providing of materials of a preparatory nature, in order to equip the individual to become a student. The second is the development itself.”
“If we, or anybody else, supply such study or preparatory material prematurely, it will only operate on a lower level than it could. The result will be harmless at best. At worst, it will condition, train, the mind of the individual to think and behave in patterns which are nothing less than automatic. In this latter way one can make what seem to be converts, unwittingly play upon emotions, on lesser desires and the conditioning propensity; train people to loyalty to individuals, found and maintain institutions which seem more or less serious or constructive. But no real progress towards knowledge of the human being and the other dimension in which he partly lives will in fact be made… … ….”

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A Blessing Of Love: The Poetry Of Rumi

O heart let go of your soul

Until you see the soul maker

Leave behind this deceptive faker

So you reach your real goal.
Unless you pass through here

You will never reach the beyond

Free yourself from worldly bond

Doubtless clear, to you appear.
If it is a sign that you seek

In this path, my dear friend

Yourself you must transcend

And signs to you will speak.
Go past the four and five

From six and seven look away

Rise above this earth and clay

Seven skies become alive.
When you’ve seen the seventh sky

Go to the eighth sphere

Step upon the things that appear

You’ll find the void nearby.
Within the void you shall see

The souls of dear friends

Disembodied floating heads

In the spaceless roaming free.
Close the critical eye

Appeal to the inner sight

From yourself briefly take flight

The beloved will appear nigh.
You who have never taken a pace

On the path of misfortune

To soul’s treasure won’t attune

Unless this costly pain embrace.
O hear ye, Shams-e Tabriz

Silently speak the word

With your soul be in accord

Which you’ll see joyously frees.

—

Alas that now from our midst you are gone

In spite of the pain you resist, you are gone

Once the circle of friends you blissed

Now with the dust of ants and snakes blissed, you are gone.

What of all the knowledge you endlessly list

What of such mind, in the secret list you are gone.

What of the helping hand the once would assist

What of the feet that gardens assist, you are gone.

Gentle and kind, people you charmed and wist

Then earth’s dust your dust wist, you are gone.

Your sweet replies no more persist

No more tongue that can persist, you are gone.

Jealously repented, strove to desist

Pilgrim of death, from living itself desist, you are gone.

Whither to, can’t see your dust nor your mist

This bloody path, disappearing mist, you are gone.

Silent O heart, tongue shackles your soul’s wrist

What use the flames that turn and twist, you are gone.

—
O heart, when the secrets themselves unveiled

No more exerted yourself, nor travailed

In your imagination and madness remain

Why senses regain, why your mind hailed?

Like Romeo in senseless chaos

All orders before you failed.

Ingesting spirits if you refrain

Why in the market drunken wailed?

Idleness and sitting brings you no gain

If with the seafarers forward you sailed.

Go to the desert and try to cross

You’ve seen what these ruins entailed.

Your neighbors of wine reek and stain

Drunken fragrance of wine staled.

Follow this aroma to the tavern lane

Light as the wind, the lanes brailled

Go to Shams-e Tabriz’s abode of loss

Idle, unemployed, round the world trailed.

—

To this world you have brought the fragrance

Yet perfume you have hidden from appearance

A million excitements this aroma belies

That you have thrown upon the earth and the skies.

From thy own radiant light and heat

You have set fire to the mind and soul’s seat

From taking thy life-giving jewel

The mine and the ocean have lost their cool.

Millions of souls with radiant faces

Have been confined to dark spaces.

You take the certainty of fools

And give them doubt with mental tools.

They ply themselves with their own hand

And with sweetness take a bloody stand.

The heartful find their hearts broken

The heartless with cries of alas are woken.

Shams-e Tabrizi from thy kindness

To lovers have given this madness.

________
Niyaz – Sadrang

________

With Love For You All…..

John Riley
Fair young maid all in a garden

Stange young man, passerby

He said, “Fair maid, will you marry me?”

This then, sir, was her reply:
Oh, no, kind sir, I cannot marry thee

For I’ve a love who sails all on the sea.

He’s been gone for seven years

Still no man shall marry me
What if he’s in some battle slain

Or if he’s drowned in the deep salt sea

What if he’s found another love

And he and his love both married be?
Well, if he’s in some battle slain

I will die when the moon doth wane

And if he’s drowned in the deep salt sea

I’ll be true to his memory
And if he’s found another love

And he and his love both married be

I’ll wish them health and happiness

Where they dwell across the sea
He picked her up all in his arms

Kisses gave her: One, two, three

Said, weep no more, my own true love

I am your long-lost John Riley!
Joan Baez – John Riley

Wednesday. It is incredibly beautiful in Portland today. Clear skies, crisp air… Wish you were here! (if ya aren’t already)
My friend Rik should be arriving this afternoon, and this edition of Turfing is dedicated to him. It has been a long 3 years!
I hope you enjoy the selection today, it was lots of fun putting it together….
Blessings,

Gwyllm

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On The Menu:

The Links

Sacred Intentions: Inside The Johns Hopkins Psilocybin Studies

Fotheringay (Sandy Denny) – Banks of the Nile

Orgies Of The Hemp Eaters

Arthur Rimbaud Poetry….

Fairport Convention – White Dress

Art: Alexander Cabanel

—–
Alexandre Cabanel (28 September 1823–23 January 1889) was a French painter.
Cabanel was born in Montpellier, Hérault. He painted historical, classical and religious subjects in the academic style. He was also well-known as a portrait painter. According to Diccionario Enciclopedico Salvat, Cabanel is the best representative of the L’art pompier and Napoleon III’s preferred painter.
He entered the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris at the age of seventeen. Cabanel studied with François-Édouard Picot and exhibited at the Paris Salon for the first time in 1844, and won the Prix de Rome scholarship in 1845 at the age of twenty two. Cabanel was elected a member of the Institute in 1863 and appointed professor at the École des Beaux-Arts in the same year.
Cabanel won the Grande Médaille d’Honneur at the Salons of 1865, 1867, and 1878.
He was closely connected to the Paris Salon: “He was elected regularly to the Salon jury and his pupils could be counted by the hundred at the Salons. Through them, Cabanel did more than any other artist of his generation to form the character of belle époque French painting” . His refusal together with William-Adolphe Bouguereau to allow the impressionist painter Édouard Manet and other painters to exhibit their work in the Salon of 1863 lead to the establishment of the Salon des Refusés.
A successful academic painter, his 1863 painting Birth of Venus is one of the best known examples of 19th century academic painting. The picture was bought by the emperor Napoleon III; there is also a smaller replica (painted in 1875 for a banker, John Wolf) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. It was gifted to them by Wolf in 1893.

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The Links:

The Entrances To Hell…

Designed?

Jericho may hold the key to treatment of tuberculosis

Worlds’ Oldest Temple?

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Sacred Intentions: Inside The Johns Hopkins Psilocybin Studies

An article from our friend Michael Hughes. I do hope you get a chance to read it. Fine article on important matters!

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Fotheringay (Sandy Denny) – Banks of the Nile (1970)

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Orgies Of The Hemp Eaters

Hashish Dreamers’ Festival in Northwestern Syria Occurs at the Time of the Full Moon.
Women Join The Ceremony

Scenes at the Sacred Dance That Surpass the Wildest Ecstasy of Any Opium Dream.
THE DRUG AND ITS EFFECTS

Standing in the outskirts of the little town of Latakieh, in Northwestern Syria, famous everywhere for the excellent tobacco which takes its name from the otherwise obscure and insignificant place – and turning his back on the ramshackle houses the flea infested caravansary, the malodorous bazaar and garbage strewn streets, where the scavenger dogs lie stretched out [in the] noonday sun – the traveller sees in the distance, beyond a wide stretch of green slope and alternate level, a low range of hills, on which a soft purple haze seems always to linger. These hills lie between the Lebanon, where the fierce Druses dwell in their highland fastnesses, and the Nahr-el-kebir, “The Mighty River.” They are known nowadays as the Nosairie Mountains, the home of the so-called Nosairiyeh tribesmen, the modern “Assassins,” or “Hemp Eaters,” as they should be designated from their ceremonial use of hemp, in Arabic “hashish.”
AT THE TIME OF THE FULL MOON.

The festival or gathering of the hemp eaters is celebrated monthly, at the time of the full moon, the moon being then supposed to exert a specific influence upon human beings. The sectaries meet under a sacred oak tree growing upon a hill, about equidistant from Latakieh and the valley of the Orontes, and close to a tiny village inhabited by some twenty families of the tribe.
There is an enormous drum, some three feet in diameter, standing at the entrance to the village, a couple of hundred yards off, and as soon as it begins to darken and the westering sun appears to have fairly sunk in the waters of the Mediterranean, which is clearly visible from the elevated hilltop on which the Nosarriyeh are gathered, a deafening boom comes from the instrument and rolls over the mountain tops like the rumble of thunder, rousing the tribesmen to activity, and in a moment they are on the alert. Lamps are quickly lit and suspended to the branches of the sacred oak among the dangling rags and buttons and feathers and metal scraps that decorate it. A square heap of wood is built up in front of the tree about a dozen yards from it. A sheep is brought forward by one of the men, and the rest of the tribesmen then gather around, the lamps throwing a dim light on their picturesque figures and grim countenances. The Sheikh puts his hand gently on the head of the bleating animal, it is thrown down, its throat cut, after the fashion of the Moslems, and in little more time than it takes to write the words the fleece is off, the carcass is divided and placed on the wood heap, to which fire is applied and kept up till all flesh as well as timber is utterly consumed. Now the Nosarriyeh seat themselves in a circle upon the earth, the Shiekh in the centre, with an attendant on either hand, one holding a large earthenware bowl containing a liquid, the other a bundle of stems to which leaves are attached – the leaves of the sacred hemp plant. The chief takes the stems in his left and the bowl in his right hand and slowly walks around the circle, stopping in front of each man present, who takes from him, first the greenery, at which he sniffs gently, then the bowl, the contents of which he sips. The vessel contains a sweetened infusion of hemp, strong and subtle in its action.
WHAT THE DECOCTION IS LIKE

The taste of the decoction is sweet, nauseously so, not unlike some preparations of chloroform, and its first effects are anything but pleasant, for it produces a distict tendency to vomit, not unlike a strong dose of ipecacuahna. As soon as all have in succession partaken of the drink, which is termed “homa”, big horns are produced containing spirits, for the Nosarriyeh are great dram drinkers. The horns of liquor are passed about and in a few moments the effects are apparent, following upon the hemp. The eyes brighten, the pulse quickens, the blood seems to bound more actively in the veins, and a restlessness takes possession of the whole body. At this moment the booming of a giant drum is heard again, giving the signal for the sacred dance which is the next item in the ceremonial of the evening. From each of the dozen parties or so into which the clansmen are divided one steps out, and the dozen individuals so designated form up against a gentle declivity in rear of them. Two of the tribe with a “reba,” one string fiddle, and a tambourine, seat themselves and start a peculiar air in a minor key, which all those around take up, clapping their hands the while rhythmically, and to this rhythm the dancers, joining hands as they stand, begin to move gently to and fro.
The moonlight is full on them, showing up their white nether garments, but leaving the dusky faces and dark upper garments in a semi-shadow. First the dancers move slowly, a few steps to the right and further to the left they go each time, till the movement becomes a positive allegro. Faster goes the music, faster the dancers, until with a finale furioso the men stop, panting and out of breath, at the signal of the Sheikh. He claps his hands and twelve others step out, and the figure begins as before. When these are exhausted a fresh set take their place, and this is continued until each of the clansmen has taken part in the dance. In conclusion all join hands and go seven times round the sacred oak in the direction left to right.
A CRAZY FESTIVAL

The solemn supper is now ready, and is served by the wives of the tribesmen, who have been busy preparing it in huge earthernware dishes placed upon the ground in the middle of each group. And the moonlight meal in the shade of the sacred oak is none the less striking by reason of its being dished up by women who wear in their shash-bands a sharp yataghan, of which the handle shows clearly, and a brace of pistols in the girdle. The plates are peculiar. First there is fried liver, eaten to the accompaniment of fiery arrack – the favorite spirit of the hemp eaters. Then comes “leben” – a species of sour cooked cream, with more “arak;” afterward the “kibabs” of mutton, in slices on little wooded sticks, like the familiar ware of the cat’s meat man; eggs filled with a force meat of rice, tomato, mutton and onions and “pillau.” Each person has a wooden spoon to eat with, and the etiquette of the table requires one to eat much and eat quickly, and to drink as much as one eats. The appetites of the Nosairiyeh are proverbial in Syria, the usual allowance of meat being a sheep or two. I can vouch for their tippling powers. Scores of them finish their pint horn of arrack in a couple of draughts, taking a couple of quarts in the course of their supper. The meal is really a match against time, and, with such good trencher men as the hemp eaters, is quickly finished.
The real business of the evening now begins. The hemp, powdered and mixed with sirup, is brought round in bowls, together with the decoction of the leaves well sweetened. Each of the tribesmen secures a vessel of arrack – for it quickens and heightens the action of the drugs – and disposes himself in the most comfortable attitude he can think of. Then, taking a good spoonful of the hemp, and washing it down with an equally good drink from the liquor receptable, he lies or leans back to allow it to operate. I take a reasonable allowance of the compound (it tastes very much like raw tea leaves flavored with sugar water), and then lie back to note the action on my own person, and watch, so far as I can, its effects upon the modern assassins whose systems are seasoned and more accustomed to the drug. Five, ten minutes pass, and there is no sensation; the men around me, with closed eyes, look like waxwork figures. Another ten minutes, and the pulse begins to beat rapidly, the heart commences to thump against the sides of the chest, the blood seems to rush to the head, and there is a sensation of fullness, as if the skull would be burst asunder at the base. There is a roaring in the ears, and strange lights, blurred and indistinct, pass before the eyes. In a moment and quite suddenly all of this passes off, leaving a feeling of delicious languor, and an idea that one is rising from the ground and floating in space. Little things assume an enormous size, and things seem far off.
EFFECTS OF THE DRUG.

The oak tree close by appears to be a mile off, and the cup of drink looks a yard across, the size of a big barrel. One’s hands and feet feel heavy and cumbersome, and then feel as if they were dropping off, leaving one free to soar away from the earth skyward, where the clouds seem to open to receive one, and one long perspective of light shines before the eyes. The feeling is one of estactic restfulness, contented unconsciousness, suggesting the “ninirvana” of the Buddhist. This marks always the end of the first stage of hemp eating. The aphrodisiac effects, the visions of fair faces and beauteous forms, the voluptuous dreams and languishing fancies which the Easterns experience – these are the results of larger and oft repeated doses of the drug.
Already the larger quantities of the compound, repeated many times in the meantime and stimulated by frequent draughts of arrack, are beginning to show their results upon the hitherto immobile figures of the Nosiariyeh round the sacred oak. Again and again they seize the spoon and convey it to their mouths, until the hemp craze is fully upon them. One or two stir uneasily; then another screams for “Ali, Ali!” (their founder Ali), who is identical, they say with Allah. A half a dozen respond lustily, “Ali hu Allah!” then empty the arrack cups beside them. A few move about with outstretched arms as though they were in the clouds trying to clutch the houris, whose imaginary forms they see, and disappointed, sink back, after a fresh supply of the drug has been swallowed. From the extremity beyond, where the women are located, come the sound of singing and of laugher and the rhythmic patter of feet upon the ground. The ladies have been indulging on their own account, and the noise they make rouses the men from their dreams. Three or four jump up from the floor at a single bound, and, seized by the dance mania, begin capering away as for very life. They jig here and there, they twine and twist, and writhe and wriggle and distort themselves, awakening […fragment missing…] blows off his matchlock as he capers merrily round, while his neighbor stretches out his fingers for the arrack.
END OF THE HASHISH DEBAUCH

In the distance we hear the sound of the women’s voices as they scream and sing and dance in a noisy whirl under the influence also of the intoxicating hemp. Again and yet again the tribesmen quaff from the hashish bowl, and the riot grows wilder and madder than before. It becomes a veritable saturnalia. Flushed and inflamed, they fly from side to side, tear to and fro, whirl round on the heels, skipping in the air and jumping feet high above the ground, to the banging of the great drum in the village; the shouting of those unable to move, the screeching of the “Reba,” or fiddle, which still plays on, and the crackling of the guns as they go off. Scimitars are drawn, yataghans flourished, half a dozen engage in mimic combat, slashing and cutting at each other with an all too earnest resolve to draw blood – a result speedily obtained – while yet another batch dance round and round on their heels spinning like tops in play. Faster and furious grows the corybantic rout, and in their mad excitement the men tear the garments from their bodies, throw away their weapons, fling the turbans from their heads and, naked to the waist, with dishevelled hair and eyes ablaze and extended arms, they continue their mad antics, until foaming at the mouth and bleeding from the nostrils, they sink to the earth and lie huddled in heaps, hopelessly and helplessly intoxicated with the hemp.

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Arthur Rimbaud Poetry….

Sensation
On the blue summer evenings, I shall go down the paths,

Getting pricked by the corn, crushing the short grass:

In a dream I shall feel its coolness on my feet.

I shall let the wind bathe my bare head.
I shall not speak, I shall think about nothing:

But endless love will mount in my soul;

And I shall travel far, very far, like a gipsy,

Through the countryside – as happy as if I were with a woman.

—
Ophelia
I
On the calm black water where the stars are sleeping

White Ophelia floats like a great lily;

Floats very slowly, lying in her long veils…

– In the far-off woods you can hear them sound the mort.
For more than a thousand years sad Ophelia

Has passed, a white phantom, down the long black river.

For more than a thousand years her sweet madness

Has murmured its ballad to the evening breeze.
The wind kisses her breasts and unfolds in a wreath

Her great veils rising and falling with the waters;

The shivering willows weep on her shoulder,

The rushes lean over her wide, dreaming brow.
The ruffled water-lilies are sighing around her;

At times she rouses, in a slumbering alder,

Some nest from which escapes a small rustle of wings;

– A mysterious anthem falls from the golden stars.
II
O pale Ophelia! beautiful as snow!

Yes child, you died, carried off by a river!

– It was the winds descending from the great mountains of Norway

That spoke to you in low voices of better freedom.
It was a breath of wind, that, twisting your great hair,

Brought strange rumors to your dreaming mind;

It was your heart listening to the song of Nature

In the groans of the tree and the sighs of the nights;
It was the voice of mad seas, the great roar,

That shattered your child’s heart, too human and too soft;

It was a handsome pale knight, a poor madman

Who one April morning sate mute at your knees!
Heaven! Love! Freedom! What a dream, oh poor crazed Girl!

You melted to him as snow does to a fire;

Your great visions strangled your words

– And fearful Infinity terrified your blue eye!
III
– And the poet says that by starlight

You come seeking, in the night, the flowers that you picked

And that he has seen on the water, lying in her long veils

White Ophelia floating, like a great lily.

—

Sun and Flesh (Credo in Unam)

Birth of Venus
I
The Sun, the hearth of affection and life,

Pours burning love on the delighted earth,

And when you lie down in the valley, you can smell

How the earth is nubile and very full-blooded;

How its huge breast, heaved up by a soul,

Is, like God, made of love, and, like woman, of flesh,

And that it contains, big with sap and with sunlight,

The vast pullulation of all embryos!
And everything grows, and everything rises!
– O Venus, O Goddess!

I long for the days of antique youth,

Of lascivious satyrs, and animal fauns,

Gods who bit, mad with love, the bark of the boughs,

And among water-lilies kissed the Nymph with fair hair!

I long for the time when the sap of the world,

River water, the rose-coloured blood of green trees

Put into the veins of Pan a whole universe!

When the earth trembled, green,beneath his goat-feet;

When, softly kissing the fair Syrinx, his lips formed

Under heaven the great hymn of love;

When, standing on the plain, he heard round about him

Living Nature answer his call;

When the silent trees cradling the singing bird,

Earth cradling mankind, and the whole blue Ocean,

And all living creatures loved, loved in God!
I long for the time of great Cybele,

Who was said to travel, gigantically lovely,

In a great bronze chariot, through splendid cities;

Her twin breasts poured, through the vast deeps,

The pure streams of infinite life.

Mankind sucked joyfully at her blessed nipple,

Like a small child playing on her knees.

– Because he was strong, Man was gentle and chaste.
Misfortune! Now he says: I understand things,

And goes about with eyes shut and ears closed.

– And again, no more gods! no more gods! Man is King,

Man is God! But the great faith is Love!

Oh! if only man still drew sustenance from your nipple,

Great mother of gods and of men, Cybele;

If only he had not forsaken immortal Astarte

Who long ago, rising in the tremendous brightness

Of blue waters, flower-flesh perfumed by the wave,

Showed her rosy navel, towards which the foam came snowing

And , being a goddess with the great conquering black eyes,

Made the nightingale sing in the woods and love in men’s hearts!

—
My Bohemian Life (Fantasy)
I went off with my hands in my torn coat pockets;

My overcoat too was becoming ideal;

I travelled beneath the sky, Muse! and I was your vassal;

Oh dear me! what marvellous loves I dreamed of!
My only pair of breeches had a big whole in them.

– Stargazing Tom Thumb, I sowed rhymes along my way.

My tavern was at the Sign of the Great Bear.

– My stars in the sky rustled softly.
And I listened to them, sitting on the road-sides

On those pleasant September evenings while I felt drops

Of dew on my forehead like vigorous wine;
And while, rhyming among the fantastical shadows,

I plucked like the strings of a lyre the elastics

Of my tattered boots, one foot close to my heart
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Fairport Convention – White Dress

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You Know Who You Are….

The Stones at Carnac…

I have been playing with this entry for a couple of days…
Our good friends Rik and Christel are coming for a visit starting Wednesday, and we are all very excited at Caer Llwydd. Rik and I go back 40 years, having been in High School together in Mt. Shasta. He and Christel live in Cathar country in the South of France in a 1000 year old house. They are state side visiting friends family, and newly arrived babies.
Rik and I share a passion for folk music, especially the British Folk Tradition. Whereas, I tended towards Pentangle he tended towards Fairport Convention. Anyway, I am going to run some selections from both over the next few days, including side projects, solo careers etc.
Bright Blessings,
Gwyllm
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On The Menu:

Emma Goldman Quotes

‘Bert Jansch – Black Waterside’

Folk Tale From Britanny: The Changeling

Moonshine – Bert Jansch

Bert Jansch Lyrics

Travelling Song – Pentangle

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Emma Goldman Quotes

If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.
Anarchism is the great liberator of man from the phantoms that have held him captive; it is the arbiter and pacifier of the two forces for individual and social harmony
Every daring attempt to make a great change in existing conditions, every lofty vision of new possibilities for the human race, has been labeled Utopian.
No great idea in its beginning can ever be within the law. How can it be within the law? The law is stationary. The law is fixed. The law is a chariot wheel which binds us all regardless of conditions or place or time.
No one has yet realized the wealth of sympathy, the kindness and generosity hidden in the soul of a child. The effort of every true education should be to unlock that treasure.

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‘Bert Jansch – Black Waterside’

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Folk Tale From Britanny: The Changeling

MARIANNIK and her husband lived in a thatched cottage. It was hidden in a lonely heath like a bird’s nest in a tree. In the summer the thatch was covered with flowers and matched the heath itself. in winter it looked like a rough, furry coat thrown over the cottage’s shoulders to keep it warm.
Within, the cottage danced in firelight. Here was an ancient linen press on which were carved curious figures. In the corner stood the box bed, its sliding doors cut in fanciful lace patterns. The chest, the table, and the benches were polished till they shone in the light from the burning logs. Near the fireplace was the cradle, also of carved wood, and in the cradle was Mariannik’s and her husband’s treasure, the darling of the cottage, Loik, their little son.
One day Loik was sleeping peacefully, the fire was crackling merrily, and the cat seated on the warm hearthstone was purring and washing her face. Mariannik got up and looked out of the window.
“The sun is shining now,” she said, “but I know it is going to rain, because pussy is washing behind her ears; that is a sure sign. I’ll go and fetch a bucket of water before the rain muddies the spring.”
She kissed Loik and set out for the fountain where she filled her bucket. As she was coming back she saw a tiny, crested bird singing on a hawthorn bush, and this is what he sang:
“Mariannik, be quick, be quick,

For in the cradle is no Loik.”
“You silly bird!” exclaimed Mariannik, “Loik cannot walk,” but all the same with a flutter at her heart she hurried across the heath to the cottage.
She opened the door and felt at once that something terrible had happened. The fire had gone out. The cat’s back was bristling. She hastened to the cradle where, instead of seeing Loik’s round and rosy face, Oh, lack-a-day! she beheld a hideous dwarf with a dark and spotted face. He had a huge and gaping mouth; his hands and feet were evil, threatening, jagged claws.
“Merciful heavens!” cried Mariannik. “Who, are you? What have you done with my blessed child?”
The dwarf answered never a word, but grinned a wicked grin.
When Mariannik’s husband came in from the fields he found her weeping, the baby gone, the dwarf howling, the cat spitting, and the cottage cold.
They took counsel together and decided that Mariannik must go back to the hawthorn bush where the bird had sung to her.
So back she went and when she got there, sure enough, there sat the crested bird perched on a swinging twig.
“Little bird, little bird,” cried Mariannik, “my Loik is lost, and a wicked dwarf is in his cradle. Pray tell me what to do.”
“Mariannik, Mariannik,” chirped the little bird, “your Loik is not lost, he has been stolen by the Queen of the Dwarfs. Before he can be rescued you must make the changeling speak. Now mark well what I say. Go home and in an eggshell prepare a meal for ten strong ploughmen. Then will the dwarf demand of you what you are doing. Quickly, Mariannik, seize him and beat him with all your strength. Beat him till he screams for help. His mother, the Queen of the Dwarfs, will come and give you back your Loik.”
So Mariannik hurried to the cottage, and without a word she took an eggshell and in it began to prepare a meal for ten strong ploughmen.
“What are you doing, mother, what are you doing? shrieked the ugly dwarf, sitting upright in the cradle.
“What am I doing, hideous creature, what am I doing? I am preparing a meal for ten ploughmen in an eggshell.”
“A meal for ten ploughmen in an eggshell, mother? I saw the egg before I saw the white hen. I saw the acorn before I saw the oak tree. I saw the tree in the enchanted woods, but I never saw a sight such as this.”
“You have seen too many things, thou hideous one. Thou son of evil, I have you now!” And Mariannik beat him with all the power of her arm.
“Help! help!” screeched the creature, calling for his mother, the Queen of all the Dwarfs.
“Mariannik, Mariannik! Forbear from beating of my son,” cried a shrill, excited voice. “Behold I give you Loik!”
Breathless, Mariannik stopped. The yells had ceased. She looked at the cradle in amazement. The ugly dwarf had disappeared and Loik, her beloved child Loik, was there again. As Mariannik bent over him to kiss him he stretched out his arms to her and said:
“Mother, mother, dear little mother, what a long sleep I have had.”

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Moonshine – Bert Jansch

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Bert Jansch Lyrics

Some of these Bert wrote, and some he added on to. A coulple of these, well they are absolutely ancient.
Reynardine
One evening as I rambled

Among the leaves so green

I overheard a young woman

Converse with Reynardine
Her hair was black, her eyes were blue

Her lips as red as wine

And he smiled to gaze upon her

Did that sly old Reynardine
She said, “Kind sir, be civil

My company forsake

For in my own opinion

I fear you are some rake”
“Oh no,” he said, “no rake am I

Brought up in Venus’ train

But I’m seeking for concealment

All along the lonesome plane”
“Your beauty so enticed me

I could not pass it by

So it’s with my gun I’ll guard you

All on the mountains high”
“And if by chance you should look for me

Perhaps you’ll not me find

For I’ll be in my castle

Inquire for Reynardine”
Sun and dark, she followed him

His teeth did brightly shine

And he led her up a-the mountains

Did that sly old Reynardine
Sylvie
As Sylvie was walking down by the riverside

As Sylvie was walking down by the riverside

And looking so sadly

looking so sadly

looking so sadly

All upon the swift tide
She thought on her lover that left her in pride

She thought on her lover that left her in pride

On the banks of the meadow

On the banks of the meadow

On the banks of the meadow

She sat down and cried
And as she sat weeping a young man came by

And as she sat weeping a young man came by

What ails you my jewel

What ails you my jewel

What ails you my jewel

And makes you to cry
Well I once had a sweetheart and now I have none

I once had a sweetheart and now I have none

He’s gone and leave me

Gone and leave me

Gone and leave me

In sorrow to mourn
Last night in sweet slumber I dreamed that I did see

Last night in sweet slumber I dreamed that I did see

Mine own dearest true love

Mine own dearest true love

Mine own dearest true love

Come smiling to me
But when I awokened I found it not so

But when I awokened I found it not so

Mine eyes were like fountains

Mine eyes were like fountains

Mine eyes were like fountains

Where the waters do flow
I’ll set sail of silver and steer towards the sun

I’ll set sail of silver and steer towards the sun

And my false love will weep

My false love will weep

My false love will weep

For me after I’m gone.

—-
Rosemary Lane
When I was in service in Rosemary Lane

I won the goodwill of my master and did I

Till a sailor came there one night to lay

And that was the beginning of my misery
He called for a candle to light him to bed

And likewise a silk handkerchief to tie up his head

To tie up his head as sailors will do

And he said my Pretty Polly will you come too
Now this maid being young and foolish she thought it no harm

For to lie into bed to keep herself warm

And what was done there I will never disclose

But I wish that short night had been seven long years
Next morning this sailor so early arose

And into my apron three guineas did throw

Saying take this I will give and more I will do

If you’ll be my Polly wherever I go
Now if it’s a boy he will fight for the king

And if it’s a girl she will wear a gold ring

She will wear a gold ring and a dress all aflame

And remember my service in Rosemary Lane
When I was in service in Rosemary Lane

I won the goodwill of my master and did I

Till a sailor came there one night to lay

And that was the beginning of my misery

—
Tree Song
I wish I had a photograph

To let you see the way you smile

Upon my foolish heart
The words I do not know enough

I hope that you will find my song

A pleasing to your ear
You step beneath the midnight moon

To gather dewdrops for the sun

A Waiting until morn
Oh if I was a branched tree

I’d be the oak tree fast and strong

To win your gentle heart
And If I was one grain of corn

I’d wait till you did come along

To throw me to the wind
And if I was one silken thread

Embroidered all in cherry red

Upon your breast I’d lie
And if I was the alder tree

I’d burn it fiercely over thee

Our love would surely last
And if I was the hawthorn bush

And you did shelter under me

I would not do you harm
And if I was one glass of wine

One sip from you would give me time

To take you by the hand
And all across the hills we’d go

In search of what no-one does know

Except for you and I

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Travelling Song – Pentangle

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