Gwyllm.com

It has been a week since I posted… very busy with art and getting the new Invisible College Magazine ready for release, and as a matter of fact, here it is:The Invisible College Magazine 3rd Edition!
Please check out this free online version of IC-3rd edition…. The printed version will be out shortly btw… a few days whilst I figure how LuLu.com does its thing and all.
Lots of stuff in this one The Free-Online version clocks in at 92 pages, and the Complete Printed version clocks in at 108 pages. More poetry, art and articles!
Stay Tuned, and Enjoy!
Gwyllm
On The Menu:
A Saucerful of Secrets

& A Saucerful of Secrets

Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun…

Poetry: by Percy Bysshe Shelley
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A Saucerful of Secrets(from Fortean Times….)

“…UFOs were not just in the air, they’d become a religion and the word a common sacrament to everyone who’d tripped.” – Neil Oram
The word hippie conjures visions of brightly clad youth rebelling against society while advocating peace, free love and the right to alter their consciousnesses in whatever way they chose. But behind the fashions and fads, the hippie underground movement in the UK was responsible for the greatest expansion of interest and belief in fortean phenomena in history.
Social historians invariably associate the hippie movement with Eastern religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism, sources of both inspiration and imagery, and the hippies’ interest in these belief systems has been well documented. But there was another alternative to the blinkered Western worldview of the 1960s already deeply embedded in the British cultural psyche, and already present in the lives of those who would form the movement known as the Underground – the flying saucer culture.
In the mid-1960s, although flying saucers were being discussed among the influential group of post-beatniks and modern mystics who would form the core of the Underground, the nascent movement lacked a voice. A figurehead was needed, someone who could breathe life into the background hum of belief in flying saucers, articulating it for the burgeoning subculture.
That voice came in the form of John Michell, whose influence on the Underground, and forteana in general, cannot be overestimated. Like many of his generation, Michell was disillusioned by the acquisitive post-war society: “When I was at Cambridge, the whole atmosphere was extremely rationalistic, materialistic. Everyone believed the current academic orthodoxies of the time and there seemed no way of questioning them.”
UFOs first caught Michell’s imagination in the 1950s when he noticed that “it was quite obvious that people were having experiences that weren’t allowed for within the context of our education. There was a split between the view of the world we’d been taught and accepted unquestioningly and the world of actual experience.” To Michell, flying saucers were more than just ‘nuts-and-bolts’ craft; they were one of a number of phenomena which became attached to the ‘Matter of Britain’. This corpus of belief largely concerned itself with the legends of King Arthur and the Holy Grail and was focused on the Somerset town of Glastonbury.
The View Over Glastonbury
Glastonbury is firmly embedded in the public consciousness as a centre of all things strange. Since the early 20th century, it has been the pulse of alternative Britain and has seen wave after wave of settlers arrive there, each seeking their personal Holy Grail. This vortex of the weird was well known to John Michell, who decided to experience the ‘Glastonbury effect’ for himself:
“It was, I think, in 1966 that I first went to Glastonbury, in the company of Harry Fainlight… We had no very definite reason for going there, but it had something to do with… strange lights in the sky, new music, and our conviction that the world was about to flip over on its axis so that heresy would become orthodoxy and an entirely new world-order would shortly be revealed.
“At that time I was writing the first of my published books, The Flying Saucer Vision. It followed up the idea, first put forward by CG Jung in his 1959 book on flying saucers, that the strange lights and other phenomena of the post-war period were portents of a radical change in human consciousness coinciding with the dawn of the Aquarian Age. A theme in my book was the connection between ‘unidentified flying objects’ and ancient sites, as evidenced both in folklore and in contemporary experience.” In this statement, Michell encapsulated an entirely new way of looking at flying saucers and their meaning.
Michell may have been the catalyst and helmsman for the hippies’ interests in flying saucers but the motive power was provided by the drug LSD, which had hit London during 1964–5. LSD, or acid as it was known, was quickly taken up by the countercultural mystic vanguard and suddenly everything was not only possible, it was likely!
Art gallery owner and Underground luminary Barry Miles summed up the effect of the drug on the hippies: “From the mid-Sixties onwards you have what would have to be called a sort of LSD consciousness permeating the whole of the counterculture side of British society. And you get it in the songs of Pink Floyd… all these bands incorporate LSD-inspired imagery, and that of course was not the normal imagery of love songs and picking up girls, it was much more to do with a sort of specifically British form of psychedelia which involved dancing gnomes and flying saucers”.
The combination of a new generation of seekers with powerful psychedelic drugs revivified Glastonbury as a spiritual centre. Now, in addition to King Arthur, the terrestrial zodiacs and other landscape legends, flying saucers were also woven into the tapestry of belief. Issue one of the Underground magazine Albion, edited by Michell, provides the visual clues; dragons and UFOs appear in the skies over Glastonbury Tor, while swords, serpents and geomantic imagery are visible in the Earth below. A new meaning for flying saucers was being forged, and to the Underground this blend of saucers, sacred sites and mythology was a damn sight more interesting than the nuts-and-bolts, sci-fi derived vision of the UFO orthodoxy.
Barry Miles was also aware of the attraction Glastonbury held for those in the counterculture: “The King’s Road led straight to Glastonbury in those days… The people we knew led double lives, experimenting with acid, spending entire evenings discussing flying saucers, ley lines and the court of King Arthur. Other people waited patiently at Arthur’s Tor for flying saucers to land.” And as word got around that Glastonbury was the new ‘window area’ for UFO sightings, more and more hippies made it a place of pilgrimage. According to Michell, “UFOs were constantly being sighted over St Michael’s Tower on Glastonbury Tor. Mark Palmer, Maldwyn Thomas and their group were then travelling with horses and carts on pilgrimages across England. They often camped near the Tor, and while I was with them we used to watch the nightly manœuvrings of lights in the sky. Jung’s prophecy of aerial portents being followed by a change in consciousness was evidently being fulfilled.”
Craig Sams, who set up England’s first macrobiotic restaurant, was also a Glastonbury enthusiast: “I didn’t see a flying saucer till October 1967 when I went to Glastonbury. One day I got a ’phone call from Mark Palmer saying that it would be a good idea to come down, that there was a lot of UFO activity, that John Michell, who had just written The Flying Saucer Vision, was camping down there, and Michael Rainey. So here we are in the field and up come the UFOs. We weren’t tripping, I’d given up acid. I was completely normal, maybe I’d had a cup of tea about half an hour before… Mark Palmer saw them – they were definitely there. They were in the classic cigar-shaped mother-ship form. Little lights emanating from them. Then at one point you saw these other lights coming up towards them and the smaller lights just shot into the cigar-shaped mother-ship, which then just disappeared at high speed. The other lights had been RAF jets. It was obvious that the RAF had scrambled some jets.”
It would be easy to dismiss the Underground’s fascination with saucers if it weren’t for the fact that 1967 was a huge ‘flap’ year for UFO sightings in the UK. This wasn’t just a ‘hippie thing’ – it was even happening to policemen, who chased them for hours in their patrol cars. The MOD was so inundated by UFO reports it radically changed its UFO policy and set up a team of investigators to interview civilian UFO witnesses, the first time this had been done.
Saucer Ro
ck
As flying saucers became further embedded in popular culture, rock musicians were becoming interested in them as a means of expressing the psychedelic experience. Music promoter Joe Boyd consolidated the link between drugs, music and flying saucers when he named one of the first hippie clubs, on London’s Tottenham Court Road, ‘UFO’. Although ‘Unidentified Flying Object’ was only one of its meanings, advertisements in International Times (it) showed a flying saucer hovering over the head of a dancing hippie. Most musical histories of the psychedelic era use Eastern influences – sitars and raga-like instrumentals – as the primary indicator of how ‘far out’ the music was. But there was another aspect of psychedelia steeped in saucers and space.
Pink Floyd’s first album The Piper at the Gates of Dawn included the atmospheric pæan to deep space Astronomy Domini, possibly the first song to use outer space as a metaphor for inner space. By their second album, Pink Floyd had further absorbed saucer culture, entitling it A Saucerful of Secrets, and were mixing ideas of UFOs and the secrets of the mind (with, perhaps, a nod toward a particularly potent batch of LSD called ‘flying saucers’). The sleeve artwork left fans in no doubt that space – inner or outer – was the place: swirling universes and spinning discs mixed with signs of the zodiac (adapted from the Marvel Comics encounter between Dr Strange and the Living Tribunal). The album’s keynote song, Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun, became the backdrop for many psychedelic journeys toward dawn.
Even the Rolling Stones – possibly the least spiritual band of the Sixties generation – took an interest in saucers. John Michell accompanied them on a saucer-spotting mission to Stonehenge, while singer Marianne Faithfull recalls the Stones’ ill-starred rhythm guitarist Brian Jones taking a great interest in Michell’s ideas on the subject; “Like a lot of people at the time, myself included, he was convinced there was a mystic link between druidic monuments and flying saucers. Extraterrestrials were going to read these signs from their spaceship windows and get the message. It was the local credo: Glastonbury, ley lines and intelligent life in outer space…” Similarly, the Stones’ Keith Richards was more than curious about saucers: “I’ve seen a few, but nothing any of the ministries would believe,” he told a Melody Maker journalist. “I believe they exist – plenty of people have seen them. They are tied up with a lot of things, like the dawn of man, for example. It’s not just a matter of people spotting a flying saucer. I’m not an expert. I’m still trying to understand what’s going on.”
Throughout his career, David Bowie has flirted with the idea of ‘the alien’, often mentioning extraterrestrials in songs such as Starman, and creating the Ziggy Stardust persona. In the late 1960s, before he was catapulted to fame with the single Space Oddity, he claimed to have been closely involved with flying saucer research. In 1975, he revealed to Creem magazine: “I used to work for two guys who put out a UFO magazine in England about six years ago. And I made sightings six, seven times a night for about a year, when I was in the observatory. We had regular cruises that came over. We knew the 6.15 was coming in and would meet up with another one. And they would be stationary for about half an hour, and then after verifying what they’d been doing that day, they’d shoot off.” The fact that the ‘6.15’ was so regular over south London should have given Bowie a hint that it might have been an aircraft rather than a UFO! Bowie’s active interest in UFO research dwindled as his fame as a performer grew, but it can’t have been helped by this event, recounted in a recent issue of The Word: “An early attempt, while living in Beckenham, to attract extraterrestrials involved standing on his roof at dusk pointing a coat hanger into the skies. He gave up, dejectedly, when a passer-by enquired, ‘Do you get BBC2?’”
Notes From the Underground
If music was one way of spreading the flying saucer message through the Underground, then poster art was another powerful method. Artists created lavish posters for even the smallest-scale event, incorporating the myths, signs and symbols of the era with visual images of the music and musicians. Barry Miles recalled: “The symbol of the flying saucer on the posters of Michael English and Nigel Weymouth and the references in all of the songs wasn’t just used as a graphic symbol or a convenient lyrical device. People did feel that flying saucers were shorthand for a wider, deeper understanding, a sort of god figure I suppose or a sense of an external spiritual deity of some sort. There was one clothes shop called Hung On You that Michael Rainey had, and he very much believed in flying saucers, and there was a lot of flying saucer imagery all over the shop.”
As saucers permeated the hippie subculture, they began to appear more frequently in the underground press. International Times featured many articles and book reviews concerning saucers, engaging John Michell as its ‘UFO correspondent’. In the 16 June 1967 issue, it reviewed Anatomy of a Phenomenon, the first UFO book by French scientist and influential ufologist Jacques Vallee. Reviewer Greg Sams used the argot of the period to express what a significant book it was: “Do you believe in flying saucers? Most people with even a slightly open mind accept their existence, if only because so many reliable people have seen them… The book itself doesn’t turn you on. You must read the book and turn yourself on… If you are just beginning to be interested in saucers then read his book. If you are already convinced and want a beautiful rave with your mind, read other further out authors.”
Quite!
Oz was less keen on UFOs, editor Richard Neville being more interested in provoking the establishment through explorations of radical politics or sex than through modern myths. But when Neville took his eye off the ball for issue nine, leaving the work to poster artist Martin Sharp and designer John Goodchild, he was shocked at the result: “To my embarrassment, it was devoted to flying saucers.” Enraged, he asked Sharp, “How can you indulge your intergalactic delusions, when Asia is a bloodbath?” Sharp’s reply typified the zeitgeist: “There are far more things in heaven and earth, Richard, than are dreamt of in your philosophy”.
The cover of Flying Saucer Oz, as it became known, featured a large flying disc, taken from a collage by the Dadaist/Surrealist Max Ernst, with six coloured pages featuring a variety of quotes about the saucer phenomenon from ‘hip’ people ranging from Charles Fort to Mick Jagger.
John Michell’s influence on the hippie movement, coupled with his erudition, was such that the ‘establishment’ couldn’t just ignore him. Following the screening of UFOs and the People Who See Them on BBC1 on 9 May 1968, The Listener devoted most of that week’s issue to a discussion of flying saucers. Michell was asked to contribute an essay, simply entitled Flying Saucers, which clearly laid out the hippie philosophy in relation to aerial phenomena – a blend of sightings of inexplicable lights in the sky, snippets of folklore, Glastonbury ley and dragon lines and other ephemera from the Underground’s dream world.
Listener editor Karl Miller contributed a critical piece, Midsummer Nights’ Dreams, analysing the ‘UFO cult’ and Michell’s place within it. “He is less a hippie, perhaps,” opined Miller, “than a hippie’s counsellor, one of their junior Merlins.’ Recognising Michell’s influence, but critical of his stance, Miller wrote that “Michell behaves like a visionary, though his language doesn’t always avoid the current jargon of the pads and barricades. He likes to talk about how the light from the midsummer sunrise shot across the land, travelling a line from holy
place to holy place, starting the crops, bathing the feasts and fairs that saluted its passage. I would say that… his book is relatively weak, busying itself with sundry mysteries like that of the Mary Celeste and converting them to extraterrestrial proofs.” ‘Straight’ society was intrigued by the hippie take on flying saucers but then, as now, saw no real evidence it could take seriously.
Just as straight society dissociated itself from the hippies, mainstream UFO enthusiasts kept their distance too, the nuts-and-bolts saucer buffs considering the newcomers to be just a bunch of drug takers with strange views (the irony that mainstream society viewed the nuts-and-bolts crowd as being equally strange was completely lost on them!)
Saucer Camp
Nevertheless, some influential individuals from the orthodoxy saw that the hippies were receptive to new ideas, and that mercurial aristocrat of flying saucer culture, Desmond Leslie, decided to organise the UK’s first flying saucer convention for them (see FT225:40–47). The conference, held during the summer of 1968 on Lusty Beg Island on Lower Lough Erne in County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland, was jointly organised by Leslie and Camilla, Countess of Erne. Camilla was a wealthy socialite with an interest in flying saucers who frequented the edges of the Underground.
The Lusty Beg event was small, with attendance estimated at about 80 people, but many of those who attended were influential movers and shakers from the Underground, including Nicholas Saunders, editor of Alternative London and founder of the Neal’s Yard shopping complex in Covent Garden. Saunders recalled: “I was fascinated by what John Michell was saying about UFOs and leylines and so on, but felt pretty guarded about it too. I did go to a Flying Saucer conference on an island in the middle of a lake in the northwest of Ireland. There were all these people plodding about in the rain and the mud and there were very serious talks by people who either said that flying saucers had visited, that they’d been on flights themselves or that they’d seen them.”
Another key member of the Underground, Neil Oram (See FT217:44–49), was also there. Oram had morphed from beatnik wanderer to hippie philosopher, later writing his semi-fictional memoirs as The Warp trilogy. In Lemmings On the Edge, he describes the scene as he arrived at the shores of Lough Erne: “At the water’s edge, we were met by Michael Roner, who took us across the choppy lake in a battered rowing boat which was equipped with a noisy, erratic outboard motor. Apart from the big white house on the lawn, the rest of the island was overgrown, without a trace of permanent habitation. Although now there were camp fires and tents scattered all over the wooded hills, which rose quite steeply from the beach.”
Desmond Leslie was responsible for organising the conference lectures, held each evening in a large marquee. Scant information now exists as to exactly who spoke, but Neil Oram remarks that they consisted of “rather dull pronouncements of what lay in store for the human race”. According to Oram, “It wasn’t until the fourth night that we were given some real information, by an ex-Australian Air Force radar expert.” This impressed Oram: “It made my hair stand on end when we learnt that he’d picked up unidentified craft, whose estimated diameter was in the region of three hundred miles! MILES! Travelling in excess of one hundred THOUSAND miles an hour!”
Johan Quanjar, another attendee, recalled: “[D]ozens of people had descended on the island for fun, jollity and invocation of higher energies. By the end of the week, the entire hippie UFO community had gone native. They had formed separate tribes with some not speaking to others.”
This event was as close as the hippies ever got to organising the subculture’s fascination with flying saucers, but they were rapidly losing interest. Too many other fantastic possibilities vied for their attention, and when you’d explored inner space, outer space could seem positively tedious. Essentially, those among the Underground who took an avid interest in flying saucers did so not out of certain belief, but from a desire to explore the possibilities. When the flying saucer experience didn’t deliver the goods or, as the hippies saw on Lusty Beg, it descended into conflict and argument, they didn’t want to know.
Poet and author Barry Gifford, whose novel Wild at Heart was used by David Lynch as the basis for his film, sojourned as a hippie in late 1960s London. In The Duke of Earls Court, Gifford writes of his interest in UFOs and refers to an incident in which a friend called Ace invited the editor of Flying Saucer Review to dinner. The clash of cultures was inevitable: “It was obvious upon his entrance that the editor, an ordinary-looking, balding, middle-aged man in a dark grey three-piece suit, was visibly shaken by the den of freaks to which he had unwittingly lent his presence. He had no idea, he said, attempting to smile, that the dinner was to be such an event.
“After answering a few desultory questions about saucers, it was clear that the editor wanted to be anywhere else but with those people. The food was macrobiotic and when he enquired what was in the meal was told, ‘Brown rice, kasha, bulgur, soy, miso. The food of the people. It makes you high’. Mention of the word ‘high’ caused the editor to drop his fork, obviously afraid that the meal had been spiked with drugs of some form. He left soon afterwards, pleading a prior engagement.”
Selling Saucers by the Pound
Flying saucers continued to be courted by the Underground in the dying embers of the 60s, but by 1970 the hippie movement had become subsumed into the broader spectrum of youth culture: now, you could buy kaftans in Marks and Spencers, and like all youth movements, it had been diluted and repackaged by commercial interests; it was being sold rather than invented. Those who had been heavily involved in saucerdom moved swiftly on. For everyone else, the subject of UFOs was now just another hip belief to be ‘into’; the publishing floodgates opened and books on Earth Mysteries, witchcraft, folklore, astrology, occultism and mysticism offered other ways of thinking and being.
But were it not for the hippies’ interest in flying saucers, nurtured by John Michell, it’s doubtful that the continuing interest in such subjects would be part of our cultural landscape in the 21st century. This brief burst of drug-fuelled exploration cross-pollinated many fortean subjects, the results of which we see today. Where mainstream ufology was mired in the yes/no argument about the physical reality of UFOs, the hippies treated the subject as just one in a long line of possibly useful ideas. This difference of attitude between the hippie and straight views of saucers was aptly summed up in an exchange between Barry Gifford and his friend, after the FSR editor had fled their dinner party. Referring to the editor’s ‘stuffy’ attitude Ace pointed out to Gifford:
“But it’s OK man, it really is; he’s a dedicated cat. I mean he’s never seen one, but he really believes in them flying saucers.”
“So do you,” Gifford said.
Ace nodded. “Sure, man, sure I do. The difference between him and me is that I’m not so bloody serious about it.”

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Set The Controls For the Heart of the Sun

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Poetry: by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Ozymandias

I met a traveler from an antique land

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal these words appear:

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

—
Ode To The West Wind

I.

O wild west wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being,

Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead

Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,

Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou,

Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed

The wingèd seeds, where they lie cold and low,

Each like a corpse within its grave, until

Thine azure sister of the spring shall blow

Her clarion o’er the dreaming earth, and fill

(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)

With living hues and odors plain and hill:

Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;

Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh, hear!

II.

Thou on whose stream, ‘mid the steep sky’s commotion,

Loose clouds like earth’s decaying leaves are shed,

Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean,

Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread

On the blue surface of thine airy surge,

Like the bright hair uplifted from the head

Of some fierce Mænad, even from the dim verge

Of the horizon to the zenith’s height,

The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge

Of the dying year, to which this closing night

Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre,

Vaulted with all thy congregated might

Of vapors, from whose solid atmosphere

Black rain, and fire, and hail, will burst: oh hear!

III.

Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams

The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,

Lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams,

Beside a pumice isle in Baiæ’s bay,

And saw in sleep old palaces and towers

Quivering within the wave’s intenser day,

All overgrown with azure moss and flowers

So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou

For whose path the Atlantic’s level powers

Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below

The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear

The sapless foliage of the ocean, know

Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear,

And tremble and despoil themselves: oh, hear!

IV.

If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;

If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;

A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share

The impulse of thy strength, only less free

Than thou, O uncontrollable! if even

I were as in my boyhood, and could be

The comrade of thy wanderings over heaven,

As then, when to outstrip thy skyey speed

Scarce seemed a vision; I would ne’er have striven

As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.

Oh! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!

I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!

A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed

One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.

V.

Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is;

What if my leaves are falling like its own!

The tumult of thy mighty harmonies

Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,

Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,

My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe

Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!

And, by the incantation of this verse,

Scatter, as from an extinguished hearth

Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!

Be through my lips to unwakened earth

The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,

If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

—
Hymn Of Pan

From the forests and highlands

We come, we come;

From the river-girt islands,

Where loud waves are dumb,

Listening to my sweet pipings.

The wind in the reeds and the rushes,

The bees on the bells of thyme,

The birds on the myrtle bushes,

The cicale above in the lime,

And the lizards below in the grass,

Were as silent as ever old Tmolus was,

Listening to my sweet pipings.

Liquid Peneus was flowing,

And all dark Tempe lay

In Pelion’s shadow, outgrowing

The light of the dying day,

Speeded by my sweet pipings.

The Sileni and Sylvans and Fauns,

And the Nymphs of the woods and the waves,

To the edge of the moist river-lawns,

And the brink of the dewy caves,

And all that did then attend and follow,

Were silent with love, as you know, Apollo,

With envy of my sweet pipings.

I sang of the dancing stars,

I sang of the dædal earth,

And of heaven, and the giant wars,

And love, and death, and birth.

And then I changed my pipings–

Singing how down the vale of Mænalus

I pursued a maiden, and clasp’d a reed:

Gods and men, we are all deluded thus;

It breaks in our bosom, and then we bleed.

All wept — as I think both ye now would,

If envy or age had not frozen your blood–

At the sorrow of my sweet pipings.

Off to do some Poster Printing at Doran’s… The magazine will be out later this week, I flew the tester past Earthrites yesterday. Some iffy bits, but generally well received. We are putting it out in two formats… printed! and pdf. Be there or be square!
Bright Blessings,
Gwyllm

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On The Menu:

The Links

Uh ty, govoriashchaja ryba!

The Apples of Youth and the Living Water

Gerard Manley Hopkins Poetry

Watts’ – Art

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The Links:

Legally Questionable FBI Requests for Calling Circle Info More Widespread than Previously Known

Ancient Mexican city raises questions about Mesoamerica’s Mother Culture

Four sue police, alleging “dirty tactics”

How to Reappear Completely

Portland Will Vote to Legalize Marijuana
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Uh ty, govoriashchaja ryba!

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The Apples of Youth and the Living Water
In a certain kingdom, in a certain land, there lived a Tsar, and he had three sons. The eldest was named , he second was named , nd the youngest was name .
This Tsar was in his old age, and his eyesight was poor. And he heard that past , in te kingdom, there was an orchard where apples of youth grew, and where a well full of living water could be found. If the old man could eat such an apple, he would find youth, and if he could wash his eyes with that water, his sight would be restored.
Therefore the Tsar ordered a t be prepared, and he called all the and al the , and he told them:
“Who among you, faithful noblemen, would be first among the chosen, first to volunteer, who would ride beyond three-nine lands, into the three-tenth kingdom, and would bring me some apples of youth and a ewer full of living water? I would give half my kingdom to such a man.
But then the bhind the younger, and the younger hid behind the youngest, and the youngest kept his mouth shut.
Prince Fedor came out, and said:
“We do not wish to give the kingdom away to a stranger. I will go on that errand, and I will bring you some apples of youth and a ewer full of living water.
Fedor went to the stables, chose , put on it a bridle, took out a brand-new whip, and secured the saddle with twelve straps, and one more: he did not do it for looks, but for strength. Then prince Fedor took off on his errand: he was seen mounting up, bt .
He rode far, or he rode near, he rode high, or he rode low — he rode from dawn to dusk. He arrived at a crossroads where three roads met. There was flat at that crossroads, and there was an inscription inscribed on it:
“Whoever takes the right road will save himself and lose his horse. Whoever takes the left road will save his horse and lose himself. Whoever rides straight ahead will find a wife.”
Fedor thought to himself: “I shall ride where I will find a wife.”
And he went straight ahead. He rode, and he rode some more, and he arrived to a tall ith golden roofs. A beautiful maiden ran out to greet him:
“O prince, I shall help you dismount, come with me, partake of my hospitality.”
“No, fair maiden, I do not wish to dine, and sleep will not make the road grow shorter. I must ride on.”
“O prince, do not hasten to ride on, hasten to take pleasure in life.”
Then the fair maiden helped him dismount and took him inside the castle. She fed him, and gave him to drink, and led him to bed.
No sooner did prince Fedor lie down by the wall that the maiden turned over the bed, and the prince fell down into the cellar, deep into a dungeon.

fter a time, long or short, the Tsar again ordered a great feast to be prepared and he called all the princes and all the boyars, and he told them:
“Who among you, faithful noblemen, would be first among the chosen, first to volunteer, who would ride beyond three-nine lands, into the three-tenth kingdom, and would bring me some apples of youth and a ewer full of living water? I would give half my kingdom to such a man.
But then the eldest hid behind the younger, and the younger hid behind the youngest, and the youngest kept his mouth shut.
Prince Vasilii came out, and said:
“We do not wish to give the kingdom away to a stranger. I will go on this errand, and I will bring you some apples of youth and a ewer full of living water.”
Vasilii went to the stables, chose a green-broke horse, put on it a brand-new bridle, took out a brand-new whip, and secured the saddle with twelve straps, and one more: he did not do it for looks, but for strength. Then prince Vasilii took off on his errand: he was seen mounting up, but no one saw which way he went.
He rode far, or he rode near, he rode high, or he rode low — he rode from dawn to dusk. He arrived at a crossroads where three roads met. There was a flat stone at that crossroads, and there was an inscription inscribed on it:
“Whoever takes the right road will save himself and lose his horse. Whoever takes the left road will save his horse and lose himself. Whoever rides straight ahead will find a wife.”
Vasilii thought to himself: “I shall ride where I will find a wife.”
And he went straight ahead. He rode, and he rode some more, and he arrived to a tall castle with golden roofs. A beautiful maiden ran out to greet him:
“O prince, I shall help you dismount, come with me, partake of my hospitality.”
“No, fair maiden, I do not wish to dine, and sleep will not make the road grow shorter. I must ride on.”
“O prince, do not hasten to ride on, hasten to take pleasure in life.”
Then the fair maiden helped him dismount and took him inside the castle. She fed him, and gave him to drink, and led him to bed.
No sooner did prince Vasilii lie down by the wall that the maiden turned over the bed, and the prince fell down into the cellar, deep into a dungeo.
As he fell, a voice called out to him:
“Who falls?”
“Prince Vasilii. Who has fallen?”
“Prince Fedor.”
“Well, brother, we certainly fell for it!”

. After a time, long or short, the Tsar ordered for the third time a great feast to be prepared and he called all the princes and all the boyars, and he told them:
“Who among you, faithful noblemen, would be first among the chosen, first to volunteer, who would ride beyond three-nine lands, into the three-tenth kingdom, and would bring me some apples of youth and a ewer full of living water? I would give half my kingdom to such a man.
But then the eldest hid behind the younger, and the younger hid behind the youngest, and the youngest kept his mouth shut.
Prince Ivan came out, and said:
“Father, give me yor to go on this errand, to bring you some apples of youth and some living water, and also to look for my brothers.”
The Tsar gave him his blessing. Prince Ivan went to the stables to look for to suit him. But when he looked at a horse, it shook all over, and when he put his hand on a horse, it fell to its knees.
Ivan could find no horse to suit him. He went out, his brash head bowed low. An old woman came up to him, and asked:
“Good morning, child, prince Ivan! Why are you so glum?”
“How can I not be glum, , wen I cannot find a horse to ride on my errand.”
“You only needed to ask me! There is a good horse that will suit you in the dungeon, tied down with an iron chain. If you can take it, you will find it a good horse.”
Prince Ivan went to the dungeon, he removed an iron plate from the opening. He ran up to the good horse, and the horse put its forelegs on Ivan’s shoulders. Ivan did not flinch. The horse tore off the iron chain, burst out of the dungeon, taking Ivan with it. Ivan put a brand-new bridle, and a brand-new saddle on the horse, and twelve straps, and one more — he did not do it for looks, but for strength.
Then prince Ivan set out on his errand: he was seen mounting up, but he was not seen leaving. He reached the crossroads and stopped to consider the inscription.
“If I go right, I’ll lose my horse. And what would I do without a horse? If I go straight, I’ll be wed. That’s not what I’m after. If I go left, I’ll save my horse. That’s the best way for me.”
. And he turned onto the road where he would save his horse, but lose himself. He rode for a time, long or short, he rode high, or he rode low, over green fields, over rocky mountains, he rode from dawn to dusk, and reached a smal.
The izba stood o . It had only one window.
“Izba, little izba, turn your back on the forest, your front towards me! As I enter, so will I leave.”
The little izba turned its back on the forest, and its front towards prince Ivan. He went in, and saw of the bony leg, her shoulders stretched from corner to corner, her nose had grown into the ceiling.
“Ugh, Ugh,” she said, “I haven’t heard a i a long time, haven’t seen one even longer, and here’s one coming to me! Are you seeking something, or running away from it?”
“How so, baba-yaga, you question me even before you greet me! Won’t you offer me food and drink, and a bed for the night? Then I will tell you all about me and my errand.”
The baba-yaga did just that, gave food and drink to Ivan, and made his bed, sat down by his side, and asked:
“Well now, where are you from, good man, brave youth? What land? Who are your father and your mother?”
“Grandmother, I am from such-and-such a kingdom, such-and-such a land, I am prince Ivan the Tsar’s son. I am riding beyond three-nine lands, beyond three-ten kingdoms, to fetch apples of youth and living water.”
“Oh, my dear child, you have far to travel: the apples of youth and the living water belong to a powerful , t . She is my own niece. I don’t know whether you will be able to obtain those goods…”
“Well, grandmother, would you lend your head to my shoulders, and advise me on what to do?”
“Many a youth went this way, few spoke courteously. Take my horse, child. My horse runs faster, it will take you to my middle sister, she will advise you.”
Prince Ivan arose early in the morning. He thanked the baba-yaga for her hospitality, and rode off on her horse.
Suddenly he said to the horse:
“Stop! I dropped my gauntlet!”
The horse answered:
“While you were speaking, I traveled two hndred !”
. Prince Ivan traveled far, or maybe near, he traveled all day till dark. Then he saw a small izba ahead. It stood on a chicken leg, and had only one window.
“Izba, little izba, turn your back on the forest, your front towards me! As I enter, so will I leave.”
The little izba turned its back on the forest, and its front towards Ivan. Suddenly, a horse neighed and the horse Ivan rode neighed in answer. The horses were herd-mates.
The baba-yaga in the izba (even older than the first one) heard the horses and said:
“Sounds like my sister comes to visit.”
And she came out on the porch.
“Ugh, Ugh,” she said, “I haven’t heard a Russian in a long time, haven’t seen one even longer, and here’s one coming to me! Are you seeking something, or running away from it?”
“How so, baba-yaga, you question me even before you greet me! Won’t you offer me food and drink, and a bed for the night? Then I will tell you all about me and my errand.”
The baba-yaga did just that, gave food and drink to Ivan, and made his bed, sat down by his side, and asked:
“Well now, where are you from, good man, brave youth? What land? Who are your father and your mother?”
“Grandmother, I am from such-and-such a kingdom, such-and-such a land, I am prince Ivan the Tsar’s son. I am riding beyond three-nine lands, beyond three-ten kingdoms, to fetch apples of youth and living water from the mighty warrior-maiden Sineglazka.”
“Oh, child, I don’t know whether you will be able to obtain what you seek. The road is difficult to the abode of the maiden Sineglazka!”
“Well, grandmother, would you lend your head to my shoulders, and advise me on what to do?”
“Many a youth went this way, few spoke courteously. Take my horse, child. My horse runs faster, it will take you to my older sister, she can advise you better than I.”
Prince Ivan arose early in the morning. He thanked the baba-yaga for her hospitality, and rode off on her horse.
Suddenly he said to the horse:
“Stop! I dropped my gauntlet!”
The horse answered:
“While you were speaking, I travele !”
. A tale is soon told, a deed is done slowly. Prince Ivan traveled the whole day from dawn to dusk. He arrived to a small izba. It stood on a chicken leg, and had only one window.
“Izba, little izba, turn your back on the forest, your front towards me! As I enter, so will I leave.”
The little izba turned its back on the forest, and its front towards Ivan. Suddenly, a horse neighed and the horse Ivan rode neighed in answer. Another baba-yaga came out, old, even older than the second. She looked at the horse, recognized it as her sister’s, but the rider was a stranger, a handsome young man.
Then Prince Ivan bowed to her courteously, and asked her for her hospitality. The baba-yaga had to offer him her hospitality: it was due to all, to those who came on horseback and those who came on foot, to rich and poor alike.
The baba-yaga took care of everything in no time at all: she stabled the horse, and gave food and drink to Prince Ivan, and then she questioned him.
“Well now, where are you from, good man, brave youth? What land? Who are your father and your mother?”
“Grandmother, I am from such-and-such a kingdom, such-and-such a land, I am prince Ivan the Tsar’s son.
I was at your youngest sister’s, and she sent me to your middle sister, who sent me to you. I am riding beyond three-nine lands, beyond three-ten kingdoms, to fetch apples of youth and living water from the mighty warrior-maiden Sineglazka.”
“Oh, child, I don’t know whether you will be able to obtain what you seek. The road is difficult to the abode of the maiden Sineglazka!”
“Well, grandmother, would you lend your head to my shoulders, and advise me on what to do?”
“Many a youth went this way, few spoke courteously. Oh, well, I will help you. The maiden Sineglazka is my niece, she is a powerful and mighty warrior. Her kingdom is surrounded by a wall hgh, thick. There is a watch f at the gate, they won’t even let you in. You have to go there in the middle of the night, on my own good horse. Once you’re at the foot of the wall, whip the horse with a never-lashed whip: it will jump the wall. Tie down the horse and go into the garden. You will see the apple tree with the apples of youth, and a well under the tree. Take three apples, not one more. And fill a ewer with the water. The maiden Sineglazka will be sleeping, don’t you go into her chambers, get back on the horse and whip him stoutly: he’ll jump the wall again.”
. Ivan did not spend the night at this old woman’s, he mounted her good horse and rode off in the dark. This horse hopped over swamps and bogs, jumped over rivers and lakes.
After a long time or a short, having ridden high, or maybe low, Prince Ivan arrived in the middle of the night to the foot of a towering wall. There was a guard of thirty three warriors at the gates. Ivan squeezed the horse with his legs, whipped him with his never-lashed whip. The horse was angered, and jumped over the wall. Prince Ivan dismounted, went into the garden, and saw: there stood an apple tree with silver leaves and golden apples, and there was a well under the tree. Prince Ivan picked three apples and filled his ewer from the well. And then he desired to see the powerful, mighty warrior-maiden Sineglazka with his own eyes.
Prince Ivan went into the castle, where everybody was sleeping: on one side slept six warrior-maidens, and on the other side slept six warrior maidens, and in the middle the warrior-maiden Sineglazka was sprawled all over her bed in her sleep, roaring like mountain rapids.
Prince Ivan could not resist. He kissed her and left. He mounted his good horse, but the horse said to him in a human voice:
“You did not do as you were told, Prince Ivan, you went into the castle to see the maiden Sineglazka! Now I won’t be able to jump over the wall.”
Prince Ivan whipped the horse with his brand-new whip.
“You old nag, , bg of grass, we won’t just spend the night here, we’ll lose our heads!”
The horse was angered more than ever, and he jumped over the wall, but he caught a shoe on the top of the wall: strings sounded and bells rang.
The maiden Sineglazka awoke and saw that she had been burglarized.
“Awake, awake! We have been robbed of our goods!”
She commanded that her warrior’s horse be saddled, and raced off with the twelve warrior-maidens in pursuit of Prince Ivan.
. Prince Ivan was riding as fast as his horse could go, and the maiden Sineglazka was hard on his heels. Prince Ivan arrived to house of the oldest baba-yaga, and she had a horse all ready for him. Ivan changed horses on the fly and raced off. He was scarcely out the gates when Sineglazka rode in, asking the baba-yaga:
“Grandmother, did an animal pass by here?”
“No, child.”
“Did a man ride by here?”
“No, child. But won’t you have a cup of milk after all this riding?”
“I would, grandmother, but it takes a long time to milk a cow.”
“Oh, no, child, it won’t take but a moment.”
The baba-yaga went to milk the cow, and she took her time. The maiden Sineglazka had a cup of milk and set off again in pursuit of Prince Ivan.
Prince Ivan arrived at the house of the younger baba-yaga, changed horses, and raced on. He was scarcely out the gates when Sineglazka rode in.
“Grandmother, did an animal pass by, did a man ride by here?”
“No, child. But won’t you have some ater all this riding?”
“It will take you so long to fry them!”
“Oh, no, child, it won’t take but a moment.”
The baba-yaga fried a mountain of pancakes, taking her time to prepare them. The maiden Sineglazka ate them and raced off after Prince Ivan.
Prince Ivan arrived at the house of the youngest baba-yaga, dismounted and got on his own good horse, and raced off. He was scarcely out the gates when Sineglazka rode in and asked the baba-yaga whether a man had ridden by.
“No, child. But won’t you take a nice ater all this riding?”
“It will take you so long to heat up the bath house!”
“Oh, no, child, it won’t take but a moment!”
The baba-yaga heated up the bath house, and prepared everything. The maiden Sineglazka had a steam bath, and then raced off after Prince Ivan. Her horse jumped from mountain to mountain, hopped over rivers and lakes. Soon she started catching up after Ivan.
. Ivan saw that he was pursued: twelve warrior maidens, and a thirteenth — the maiden Sineglazka. They were about to catch up with him, and they were ready to behead him. He slowed down his horse, and the maiden Sineglazka rode up to him and yelled:
“You thief, why did you drink from my well and did not replace the cover?”
He answered:
“Let’s ride three horse-jumps apart and measure our strength against each other.”
Then Prince Ivan and the maiden Sineglazka rode three horse-jumps apart, took out their war-, heir long-measured lances, their sharp sabers. They met each other three times, they broke their maces, they split their lances, they dulled their sabers, and yet neither could throw the other to the ground. There was no point in fighting a-horseback: they jumped off, and fought on bare-handed.
They fought from morning till night, thill the bright sun set. Prince Ivan’s leg slipped, he fell to te . The maiden Sineglazka put her knee on his , nd took out her great dagger to stab him in the heart.
Prince Ivan said to her:
“Do not slay me, fair maiden Sineglazka, take me instead by my white hands, help me rise from the ground, kiss me on my sweet lips.”
Then the maiden Sineglazka helped Prince Ivan to stand up, and kissed him on his sweet lips. They set up their pavillion in the wide field, in the open plain, on the green grass. They spent three days and three nights there. There they were nd exchanged rings.
The maiden Sineglazka said to him:
“I will ride home, and you go home as well, but beware: do not turn from your path anywhere… Await me in your kingdom three years hence.”
They mounted up and rode away. After a long time, or maybe a short — events happen slowly, but a tale is quickly told — Prince Ivan arrived at the crossroads where the flat stone lay, and thought:
“This is not good! I am riding home, and my brothers are lost without a trace.”
. He did not follow the orders of the maiden Sineglazka, he turned onto the road that promised marriage. He arrived to the castle with the golden roofs. Suddenly Prince Ivan’s horse neighed, and his brothers’ horses responded, for the horses were herd-mates.
Prince Ivan went up the stairs to the porch and knocked the ring so hard the finials on the rooftops shook and the window frames became crooked. A beautiful maiden ran out.
“Oh, Prince Ivan, I have been waiting for you for so long! Come, partake of m , and spend the night.”
She took him into the castle, and served h
im a real feast. Prince Ivan did not eat so much as he threw under the table, he did not drink so much as he poured out under the table. The fair maiden took him into the bedroom:
“Lie down, Prince Ivan, rest comfortably.”
But Prince Ivan threw her onto the bed, he turned the bed upside down, and the fell into the ellar, the deep dungeon.
Prince Ivan leaned over the dungeon and called out:
“Who’s alive down there?”
And he was answered:
“Prince Fedor and Prince Vasilii!”
Prince Ivan pulled them out of the dungeon: their faces were black with dirt, moss had begun to grow on them. Prince Ivan washed his brothers off with living water, and they became as before.
They mounted up on their horses and rode off. After a long while, or a short, they arrived at the crossroads. Prince Ivan told his brothers:
“Watch my horse while I rest a little.:
. He lay down on the silky grass and fell into a deep warrior’s sleep. But Prince Fedor said to Prince Vasilii:
“If we return without apples of youth or living water, there will be little fame for us, our father will send s to .”
Prince Vasilii answered:
“Let’s throw Prince Ivan into a deep ravine, and let’s take these things and hand them over to our father.”
So they took the apples of youth and the living water out of Ivan’s pocket, and threw Ivan into a deep ravine. Prince Ivan fell for three days and three nights before he reached the bottom.
Prince Ivan fell onto a sea shore, came to, and saw that there was nothing around him, just the sky and the water, and under an old oak tree, some fledgling birds were calling, for the sea was pummeling them.
Prince Ivan took off his ad covered up the fledglings, and hid under the oak tree.
The weather calmed, and the great bird Nagai came flying.
She arrived, landed under the tree, and asked her fledglings:
“My dear little children, did you suffer from the terrible weather?”
“Do not cry, mother, a Russian saved us, he covered us with his caftan.”
The bird Nagai asked Prince Ivan:
“How did you happen to be here, good man?”
“My own brothers threw me into the ravine for the apples of youth and the living water I had.”
“You protected my little ones, ask anything you want: gold, silver, precious stones,”
“I do not need anything, Nagai: I do not need gold, or silver, or precious stones. But can I return to my native land?”
The bird Nagai answered him:
“Find two barrels, each full of some twelve s of eat.”
So Prince Ivan shot many geese and y the sea shore. He put the meat into two barrels, and put one barrel on the right shoulder of the bird Nagai, the other on the left, and sat on her back. Then he began feeding the bird, and she took off and rose higher and higher.
She flew, and Prince Ivan kept feeding and feeding her. They flew a long time thus, or maybe a short time, and Ivan fed both barrels to the bird. And Nagai turned her beak to him again. Ivan took out his knife, cut a chunk off his thigh, and gave it to the bird Nagai. She flew further, and turned her beak to him again. Ivan cut a chunk off his other leg and fed it to her. They were almost there, and the bird turned to Ivan a third time, and he cut a chunk off his chest and fed it to her.
Then the bird Nagai arrived in Prince Ivan’s native land.
“You fed me well the whole time, but the last piece was the most delicious, I have never eaten the like of it.”
Prince Ivan showed her his wounds. The bird Nagai regurgitated the last three chunks, and said:
“Put them back where they belong.”
Prince Ivan did so, and the chunks adhered to his bones.
“Now dismount, Prince Ivan, I shall fly home.”
The bird Nagai rose in the air, and Prince Ivan went his way home.
. He arrived at the capital, and found out that Prince Fedor and Prince Vasilii had brought their father the apples of youth and the living water, and that the Tsar was healed: he recovered his good health and his sight.
Prince Ivan did not go to his father, or to his mother. He gathered all the drunkards, the barflies, and went from tavern to tavern.
At that time, beyond three-nine lands, in the three-tenth kingdom, the mighty warrior Sineglazka gave birth to two sons. They grew hour by hour, not day by day. A tale is quickly told, a deed is done slowly: three years passed. Sineglazka took her sons, gathered her army, and rode out in search of Prince Ivan.
She arrived in his kingdom, and set up her white pavilion in the wide field, in the open plain, on the green grass. She carpeted the path to the pavilion with bright cloth. And she sent a messenger to the capital to say to the Tsar:
“Tsar, give up your son. If you do not, I will trample your whole kingdom, I will burn it, I will take you prisoner.”
The Tsar was frightened and he sent his oldest son, Prince Fedor. Fedor walked on the bright cloth, and arrived at the white pavilion. Two boys ran out.
“Mother, mother, is this our father coming?”
“No, children, this is your uncle.”
“What should we do with him, mother?”
“Treat him as he deserves, children.”
The two little boys took some switches and began whipping Prince Fedor just below his back. They whipped him stoutly, and he barely managed to get away.
And Sineglazka sent another messenger to the Tsar: “Give up your son!…”
The Tsar was even more frightened, and he sent his middle son, Prince Vasilii . He arrived at the white pavilion. Two boys ran out:
“Mother, mother, is this our father?”
“No, children, this is your uncle. Treat him as he deserves.”
The two little boys took some switches again and began whipping Prince Vasilii just below his back. They whipped him stoutly, and he barely managed to get away.
And Sineglazka sent a third messenger to the Tsar:
“Go find your third son, Prince Ivan. If you do not find him, I will trample and burn your whole kingdom.”
The Tsar was frightened even more than before, and sent for Prince Fedor and Prince Vasilii, and ordered them to find their brother, Prince Ivan. But the brothers fell to their knees and confessed how they took the living water and the apples of youth from the sleeping Prince Ivan and threw him into a deep ravine.
Upon hearing this, the Tsar shed many tears. At that time, Prince Ivan was making his way by himself to Sineglazka’s pavilion, and all the barflies went with him. They tore up the bright cloth underfoot and tossed it to the wind.
Prince Ivan arrived at the white tent. Two boys ran out:
“Mother, mother, some drunkard is coming here with many barflies!”
Sineglazka answered them:
“Take him by his white hands, bring him into the tent. This is your own father. He has been suffering for no reason for three years!”
The boys took Prince Ivan by his white hands and brought him into the tent. Sineglazka washed him and combed his hair, put fresh clothes on him, and put him to bed. Then she gave a drink to each barfly and they went their way.
The following day, Sineglazka and Prince Ivan arrived at the Tsar’s palace. Then there was a great feast, and wedding to follow. Prince Fedor and Prince Vasilii earned little fame: they were thrown out from the palace to spend a night here, a night there, and the third nowhere.
Prince Ivan did not i his kingdom, he went away with Sineglazka to her own kingdom.
And that is the end of the story.

_______________

Gerard Manley Hopkins Poetry

The child is father to the man

‘THE CHILD is father to the man.’

How can he be? The words are wild.

Suck any sense from that who can:

‘The child is father to the man.’

No; what the poet did write ran,

‘The man is father to the child.’

‘The child is father to the man!’

How can he be? The words are wild.

—

God’s Grandeur

THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

—
Epithalamion

HARK, hearer, hear what I do; lend a thought now, make believe

We are leafwhelmed somewhere with the hood

Of some branchy bunchy bushybowered wood,

Southern dene or Lancashire clough or Devon cleave,

That leans along the loins of hills, where a candycoloured, where a gluegold-brown

Marbled river, boisterously beautiful, between

Roots and rocks is danced and dandled, all in froth and waterblowballs, down.

We are there, when we hear a shout

That the hanging honeysuck, the dogeared hazels in the cover

Makes dither, makes hover

And the riot of a rout

Of, it must be, boys from the town

Bathing: it is summer’s sovereign good.

By there comes a listless stranger: beckoned by the noise

He drops towards the river: unseen

Sees the bevy of them, how the boys

With dare and with downdolphinry and bellbright bodies huddling out,

Are earthworld, airworld, waterworld thorough hurled, all by turn and turn about.

This garland of their gambols flashes in his breast

Into such a sudden zest

Of summertime joys

That he hies to a pool neighbouring; sees it is the best

There; sweetest, freshest, shadowiest;

Fairyland; silk-beech, scrolled ash, packed sycamore, wild wychelm, hornbeam fretty overstood

By. Rafts and rafts of flake-leaves light, dealt so, painted on the air,

Hang as still as hawk or hawkmoth, as the stars or as the angels there,

Like the thing that never knew the earth, never off roots

Rose. Here he feasts: lovely all is! No more: off with—down he dings

His bleachèd both and woolwoven wear:

Careless these in coloured wisp

All lie tumbled-to; then with loop-locks

Forward falling, forehead frowning, lips crisp

Over finger-teasing task, his twiny boots

Fast he opens, last he offwrings

Till walk the world he can with bare his feet

And come where lies a coffer, burly all of blocks

Built of chancequarrièd, selfquainèd rocks

And the water warbles over into, filleted with glassy grassy quicksilvery shivès and shoots

And with heavenfallen freshness down from moorland still brims,

Dark or daylight on and on. Here he will then, here he will the fleet

Flinty kindcold element let break across his limbs

Long. Where we leave him, froliclavish while he looks about him, laughs, swims.

Enough now; since the sacred matter that I mean

I should be wronging longer leaving it to float

Upon this only gambolling and echoing-of-earth note—

What is … the delightful dene?

Wedlock. What the water? Spousal love.

. . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . .

Father, mother, brothers, sisters, friends

Into fairy trees, wild flowers, wood ferns

Rankèd round the bower

Our friend Irina moved to Olympia on Friday…. We helped with the packing and moving stuff to the van. She is off on a new adventure, but we will miss her here!
I spent some 20 hours this weekend on the magazine, it is almost there… Trying to get it to do just what I want, but it seems to have a mind of its own…

Gwyllm

____________

On The Menu

Acid Trip

DMT Experience

For Irina: Anna Akhmatova Poems

Art: Watts

Acid Trip

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______________
DMT Experience

-Scott Fossel

A composite essay of my first two DMT trips
disclaimer: This is a pale reflection of a bottomless mystery.

The things I say it is, it is now – these are but linguistic

shrouds I am able to cloak it in. Please don’t think you know DMT

from having read this, you don’t. But DO please go and try some,

go extract it from a plant – then you will KNOW. Oh, this is my

experience, you can ask me any questions you like. Everything

here is with closed eyes unless otherwise indicated – this is

really the only way to go DEEP.
The small wooden pipe was in my mouth and a match was coming to light it.

The scenario almost seemed like smoking pot except I knew the taste to be

very wrong as the complex, sweetly acrid smoke filled my lungs. Anyway, my

pulse never raced like this from the anticipation of getting stoned.
The first thing was a sense of dropping away, but to say downward would be

too simple. There were all sorts of frequency modulations and crescendoed

stacatto pops as the trip descended. This sound data was quiveringly

involved with these visual architectonic dream waters that were beginning

to emerge, dripping and slipping amongst themselves, and my being became

overwhelmed by vacuous, gravity-like suction experiences which impelled me

further in. Around me I felt a crowding in of beings as if the Celtic

Faerie land of Fay had become momentarily co-present with where I was. I

sensed them, but did not experience these creatures. The sucking experience

took over for a while then, driving the morphological acrobatics of

spacelove that lay before me. There was something about it that makes me

think of a voluptuous alien seductress with big, fat lips pulling me to her

body in the weirdest feeling embrace ever. It felt like I was being smeared

sensually and lustfully around the space in some sort of vacuum-tube

funhouse. At this point (maybe a minute into the experience) I started

picking up something like the Escher painting of all those sets of stairs

with figures descending by all manners of gravity, only its surfaces were

emerald isles of what I can only describe as fractal Medusa liquid,

serpentine and sexy. There was a thought that I was in a room full of

aliens and they were playing with me, but that somehow they had conspired

to make me this way – the alien carney music bar on the planet Tatooine in

the Star Wars trilogy seems relevant.
Then I had the thought (which just seems to pop up and not really pertain):

“What have I done! How did I get this way?” Meaning, how did I come to

enter something so foreign that my petty human ontological premises and

hopeful body of knowledge seem like a wrench trying to adjust a camel? At

that point I lost any touch with my body and was thrust forward into

complete and utter amazement. The world became so crammed full of intricacy

to the nth that it seemed every nook and cranny in my spacetime was

exfoliating little crystalline dancing worlds, bellowing ecstasy. It moved

like snakes move: all rippling of muscle and sun glinting scales. I cannot

emphasize enough the catapulting, titanic motions of this iridescent zigzag

bottlerocket, this nuanced, whittling circus of form, this Brobignagian

roller coaster safari across the jeweled plains of wonderland, straining

the limits of the knowable.
This is where I was when I felt a certain sort of shockwave across the dome

of the sky which gave me memory of the real world. I then entered this

whole journey that I would call extrication. Going in was “intrication” or

delving into intricacy, so coming back out was sensibly extrication. The

experience was very literally an incedible groping back out of this wild

wooly thing until I made it “out”, which afterwards I realized was only the

physical action of opening my eyes. The pipe was in my mouth – its touching

my lips had been the reality shockwave I’d felt. The woman who was handling

the pipe for me looked like a fractal Medusa as well, but incarnate – she

was buzzing all over with this really freaky energy. I said something like,

“You expect me to call this a mouth?”, a comment which was silenced by the

stem of the pipe. One toke and I was out of my body again, yanked back

through the scrim of the worlds into the blast furnaces of heaven.
I “came to” in some sense at this point and realized that I could do

anything in a space like this, could instantly unfold my richest possible

imaginings. “O.K.”, I said to myself, “What about trying to do what you

believe possible by your perceptual theory of higher dimensional

experience?” You see, I got the idea that there is no reason why, in an

inner experience, one has to have visions only in front of one. I began to

believe this was an imprint that years of bringing the external world into

construction of inner spaces had created, but was not necessary. I then

tried to imagine what it would be like to see in every direction at once,

i.e. what would a ball look like if you could see every side of it at once?

I could sense it but not imagine it in my mind. So this is the challenge I

set myself. It not only seemed to work (though with everything else going

on inside, it was a bit like trying to do a sensitive physics experiment in

the midst of a drunken bacchanal) but it did so immediately. I rushed

upwards into this superspace that was a spun galactic ecology of stars, a

swarming hive of dragonfly constellations . . . This was very profound, but

in doing it, it seemed I had reduced the alien quality of what had been

going on previous to this excursion.
I let my will go then and tumbled forward into elfland. Terence McKenna is

apt in calling these entities “elves”. They are elves/not-elves. They don’t

appear, they kind of ooze out of the woodwork seductively and before you

know it they’re there – the whole realm is infested with these creatures

like nothing else you could ever imagine. They do sing things that are like

“self-dribbling jeweled basketballs” or whatever you want to call them.

They make Faberge egg concoctions with ingredient lists like: 1) space, 2)

lust, 3) politics, 4) circus sideshows, 5) time, 6) gall bladders, 7)

existential notions of polyfidelity, cucumbers, 9) Beethoven’s 5th

symphony, 10) the smell of petunias, and so on. This is somewhat of an

arbitrary list, but the point is, all my categories of mind fell away

because they were being ceaselessly synthesized and re-synthesized into

these hyperdimensional objects, undulating, ululating along. It makes me

think of getting home from school when your mother says that she’s baked

you some treats, only these are like no treats Mom ever made, and when you

see them you almost want to say, “Aw, mom, you shouldn’t have. I mean you

really shouldn’t have”. What you do with these elves is some sort of a game

of catch, only the physics of the game has been replaced by the physics of

synesthesia. In catching the things they threw, in playing with them, I

participated in the ineffable mysteries that they were. This place is the

Joycean “Merry go raum”. Being there I came to understand the Heraclitus

fragment: “The Aeon is a child at play with colored balls”. It is this. As

well I understand, “Still the first day, All Fool’s Day, here at the

center.” It is this too.
So for what seemed like centuries I played with the trippy freaky elves and

they kept bringing me into atrium after atrium in the antics annex, and all

I could do was wonder when we would get to their front door. As far as I

know, we never did. Instead they said many things, though I can’t say they

used what we would call a voice to accomplish this communication. I

remember only parts of this. At first they said, “Build this”, indicating

hyperspace. Later they amended this by saying, “Build it. He will come.”

from the movie Field of Dreams. Very funny.
Then it was as though alarms started to go off, and the whole space was

going through these quivering emergency elaborations. I get the image of a

submarine movie sequence when I think back on this, just when it has been

discovered on the surface, the periscope retracts and the whole interior

goes into haywire, preparatory gymnastics as all the hatches are battened

down. There is a phenomenally high-energy dynamic associated with this

part, as they try to get you out and shut the great bronze dancing doors of

hyperspace. It is as if everything is charged with imponderable

electricities and is racing around because someone shouted: “Places

everyone!!” They start cramming your soul out of there with a million hands

at once, grabbing you by twelve dimensions you never knew your body had.

Finally, the thing shuts and there is a sense of finality to that, but just

as soon you are on to the next thing.
Slowly then it begins to make farewells and say its goodbyes. Ancient

mythos holds that the world is supported by turtles “all the way down”, but

as I came out of it, my sense was of jeweled great glass revolving

elevators all the way down. I remember thinking that I was passing back

through the 50,000 veils that the Sufis say the mystery has, one by one,

and I clearly remember the awe I felt that each one of them was closed,

sealed, and put away in a unique and voluptuous, succulent way. It was

without question the most beautiful goodbye I have known in this life.

There was no regret of leaving or longing not to leave, just an

overpowering acceptance of the imminent return. This went on and upon

opening my eyes I had this very zap experience and I was right back in this

world, amazingly enough, only ten minutes gone. Slight tracers on light and

then these gone too. I was amazed of the idea that one could go back there,

could in fact just go there, that where I had been felt entirely like it

was a whole hyperspace, raging right next door. I remember saying, and

being very sure of this as I still am now, “Those are the gods”. By which I

meant, of all the things I’ve experienced in life, they are the most like

real living gods, and should be called that. It was very interesting to me

that I didn’t need to process a whole lot, which I usually require after

the mushrooms. Instead, I think I was in a state of being so existentially

surpassed by the quality of what I had just been a part of, that I couldn’t

muster any sort of conceptual or descriptive response to it at all. By

default, I was left with just a purity of acceptance for it – I just simply

had nothing to put to it in any sense. Instead I resorted to looking wildly

and deeply into other peoples eyes and by some existential-perceptual

force, to impress upon them the utter beauty of what I had just been. This

seemed to work somewhat, though probably not. I definitely felt I had been

closer to the core of the real than ever before and that this mystery is

front and center to who we are as humans, who we really are. I felt very

connected to my universe, very sensitive and strong and in touch with

things. Because I apparently have the gift of being able to remember it

quite well (others do not), I have to live with memory of its being out

there somewhere: very real, very powerful, very alive. There has not been

an hour to pass since I did it that I haven’t thought of it and tried again

to reference it to this world, failing. I do feel it is a very important

experience to have as a human being, and in some sense a whole lot safer

than mushrooms or acid. I say this because I am aware that I usually have

time and opportunity in a traditional trip to come up with weird ideas and

believe them which can be hell to integrate when things return to normal.

DMT seems to be so awe-inspiring, one is just so floored by it, that there

is no chance for trying to figure it out.
This is left for when you return, spacecraft still steaming.
_____________
For Irina: Anna Akhmatova Poems…

“Along the Hard Crust…”

1917
Along the hard crust of deep snows,

To the secret, white house of yours,

So gentle and quiet – we both

Are walking, in silence half-lost.

And sweeter than all songs, sung ever,

Are this dream, becoming the truth,

Entwined twigs’ a-nodding with favor,

The light ring of your silver spurs…

—
“I Was Born In the Right Time…”

1913
I was born in the right time, in whole,

Only this time is one that is blessed,

But great God did not let my poor soul

Live without deceit on this earth.
And therefore, it’s dark in my house,

And therefore, all of my friends,

Like sad birds, in the evening aroused,

Sing of love, that was never on land.

—

Our Native Earth

1961
There are not any people in the world –

So simple, lofty, tearless — like us.
1922
We do not carry it in lockets on the breast,

And do not cry about it in poems,

It does not wake us from the bitter rest,

And does not seem to us like Eden promised.

In our hearts, we never try to treat

This as a subject for the bargain row,

While being ill, unhappy, spent on it,

We even fail to see it or to know.

Yes, this dirt on the feet suits us fairly,

Yes, this crunch on the teeth suits us just,

And we trample it nightly and daily –

This unmixed and non-structural dust.

But we lay into it and become it alone,

And therefore call this earth so freely — my own.

—
Muse

1924
When, in the night, I wait for her, impatient,

Life seems to me, as hanging by a thread.

What just means liberty, or youth, or approbation,

When compared with the gentle piper’s tread?
And she came in, threw out the mantle’s edges,

Declined to me with a sincere heed.

I say to her, “Did you dictate the Pages

Of Hell to Dante?” She answers, “Yes, I did.”

Here is a question for you… How do you personally learn? Through someone talking to you, by book, by tactile input? Just thinkin’….
Anyway, here it is for Wednesday. It is raining in P-Town, and I am closing in on the final for The Invisible College… (yes yes yes!)
Off to a customers, hopefully not the longest of days.
Blessings,
Gwyllm

_________
On The Menu:

The Links

Celebration Dance!

The Meeting Of Science And Mysticism

Poetry From The Past: Thomas Moore

Art: Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema

_________
The Links:

You Must Watch What You Read…

Marchers press for legal marijuana

The Woman, the Witch and the Goddess

Why Are Huge Numbers Of Camels Dying In Africa And Saudi Arabia?

This Modern World: In 1969, a group of radicals hatched a secret plan…

___________
Celebration Dance!

=en_US&fs=1&”>

____________

The Meeting Of Science And Mysticism

New theories in physics suggest that “no man is an island” and “the greatest is within the smallest”
By Robert Anton Wilson
In 1964 Dr. John Stewart Bell, an Irishman working at CERN nuclear research centre (Switzerland) published a mathematical paper that staggered the scientific world. The central idea of the paper-now Called Bells Theorem – suggested new views about reality so hair-raising that even Dr. Bell himself repudiates most of the interpretations by other physicists about what his mathematics imply.
Bell’s Theorem seems to portray a universe far weirder than science has previously realized – so weird, in fact, that it hauntingly resembles many “mystical” and “superstitious” ideas of the past. For instance, I shook hands with the editor of a Berlin magazine a month ago. Since our hands touched, according to Bell, some particles in my hand remain, and always will remain, in a kind or correlation or “union” with some particles in the editor’s hand. Mystics have talked about such linkages all through history, of course, but science never took such ideas seriously – until Bell came along.
Since so much dispute rages about Bell’s demonstration, we should use careful language in discussing it.
What Bell’s math showed was that 1) if we accept an objective universe separate from our ideas, and 2) if the equations of quantum (sub-atomic) physics accurately describe that universe, then 3) any two particles that once contacted each other continue to “influence” each other, or remain “parts of a unified system,” no matter how far apart they subsequently move in space or in time-even if they move to opposite ends of the universe.
Bell’s math thus suggests that space and time only exist on some levels of the universe-or only in our minds-or that we must assume a level of reality where space and time don’t exist at all. “Here is there,” says physicist Dr. Nick Herbert, when explaining Bell’s Theorem.” There is no difference between anything,” he adds with a twinkle in his eye.
THE BILLIARD TABLE EXAMPLE

To visualize what this means, and how it differs from all previous science, imagine an ordinary billiard table.
In Newtonian physics, if a ball (let’s call it B), moves, it’s because it is hit by another ball (which we can call A).This accords with the standard mechanical picture of the universe, which most people still identify with “science” with a capital S.
However, in field physics (pioneered in the 19th century by James Clerk Maxwell), ball B might move and ball A along with it, not because of mechanical collisions, but because a magnet below the table has created an electromagnetic field, which causes the balls to jump in a certain direction. Field theories, while in a sense less “materialistic” than mechanical collision theories, still involve connection, interaction and causality. They still live in “the same ball park” as mechanical theories.
In Einstein’s General Relativity, we find a third kind of causality. The balls might move because of the seeming flatness of the table, which we see, only appears on the small scale. On a larger scale the table actually curves. (In the Einstein universe the planets orbit the sun because space itself curves, even though we can’t see the curvature directly and have to deduce it mathematically.) This moves us even further from collision models than the field theories do, but Einstein remains in a ball park we can visualize-with a little extra effort. Einsteinian space-time involves connections, interaction and a kind of determinism-geometric determinism. The mass of matter determines the curvature of space, and the curvature of space determines the movement of matter.
In all these kinds of scientific explanations-the mechanical, the field theory and the geometric (curvature) Theory-the cause of the movement of the billiard balls can be pictured in a mental image and, once we understand the theory, it makes sense to us.
In Bell’s universe, however, ball A and ball B might moves without any of these three types of causes (the only types of causes science recognizes) -and perhaps without any cause at all! In other words, A moves because B moves or B moves because A moves and we seemingly cannot say anything more about the movements. Maybe we can’t even say the much since the word “because” doesn’t really seem to fit this case.
Imagine yourself in a room with such a billiard table. Ball A at one end of the table suddenly turns clockwise and exactly at that moment ball B at the other end turns counter-clockwise. You observe carefully that nobody pushed the balls or fired another ball at them. You check under the table and find no hidden magnets to create field effects. You then think of Einstein and geometry, but when you check, the table has no curvature of any sort. You look at the table again and ball A turns counter-clockwise while ball B turns clockwise. That sort of thing usually only happen in movies about haunted house.
SPOOKS,FLIM-FLAM OR…
At this point you would probably say, “spooks!” or something similar. James Randi would shout “Fraud!” or “Flim-flam!”
That’s just about what most physicists said when Bell’s Theorem was published. The math was absolutely irrefutable, but the conclusion seemed impossible to believe.
Several experiments, however – most notably, those by Dr. Clauser of the University of California at Berkeley and Dr Aspect at the optical institute in Orsay, France – have shown that atomic particles behave exactly as Bell said they should. For instance, in Aspect’s most recent experiment two photons (particles of light) ejected from a common source (a mercury atom) acted just as Bell predicted, or just like the billiard balls in our illustration. Whenever the photon manifested the mathematical state called “spin up,” the other photon measured “spin down.” This happened despite the total absence of any form of connection or cause known to science.
ANOTHER MODEL
To be even clear about how “mystical” this seems, let me paraphrase a life – size model once used by Dr. Bell in a lecture.
Imagine two men who live in Paris and Mexico City. Imagine that we keep them under observation continually and discover that every time the man in Paris wears red socks, the man in Mexico City wears Blue socks. Now suppose we check every possible communication system and prove that no way exists for the two men to send messages to each other – they can’t get near a phone or shortwave radio or telegraph or any similar device. Then we take the red socks of the man in Paris and put blue socks on him. Immediately – with not a fraction of a second of time delay – the man in Mexico City sits down, takes of his red socks and puts on blue socks.
Even stranger, this would happen every single time we tried the experiment if the man behaved like the atomic particles in Bell’s Theorem and the experiments of Clauser and Aspect.
WHAT IT MEANS
What the deuce can this mean? Physicists remain in violent disagreement with each other about the question, but all the answers are equally astounding to ordinary folks.
According to Dr. David Bohm of the University of London, “It may mean that everything in the universe is in a kind of total rapport, so that whatever happens is related to everything else; or it may be that there is some kind of information that can travel faster than the speed of light: or it may mean that our concepts of space and time have to be modified in some way that we don’t now understand.” (London Times, February 20, 1983.)
A HOLISTIC UNIVERSE

Consider the first alternative. If “what happens is related to everything else,” we live in the kind of holistic Universe described by the mystics of the East, especially the Hindus and Buddhists. In the humorous metaphor of Charles Fort, a a bear coughs at the north pole, a bottle of Ketchup will fall out of a wind on in New York City. In the more grim metaphors of Buddhism, if a single angry or cruel act (or thought) occurs anywhere, every sentient being in the universe will feel the effects. In the poetic language of the Englishman, John Donne: No man is an island…if a clod of Spain be washed away, Europe is the less…Each man’s death diminishes me, for I am involved in humanity.
This “non-local connection” (as some call it) may mean that if you have touched a pair of dice your brain can then exercise some control over them, just as most gamblers think. This sounds some wild, science-fiction elaboration of Bell, but it has been seriously proposed by Dr. Evan Harris Walker, an American physicist who deduced, from Bell’s math and the math of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle* just how the human brain should be able to affect the dice.
In The Complete Quantum Anthropologist, Dr. Walker demonstrates that this mathematically theoretical limit of control – “mind over matter” – corresponds exactly to the degree of control demonstrated by Hakoon Forwald, a retired electrical engineer, in a long-running series of experiments on “psychokinesis.” Forwald’s subjects in the years between 1949 and 1970 tried to influence dice by brain power and score just as far above chance as Walker’s math says they should have scored.
It does not seem far from this “psychokinesis” to the traditional belief that if a sorcerer gets a hold of a strand of your hair, anything he does will eventually affect your hair.
INFORMATION WITHOUT TRANSPORTATION
Before we get spooked too much by this line of thought, let us look at Dr. Bohm’s second alternative:”
Information that can travel faster than the speed of light,” Since no energy can travel faster than the speed of light, this means information without energy. Another physicist, Dr. Jack Sarfatti, has called it “information without transportation.” Such ghostly information moving around without energy or transportation to carry it might explain the kind of things that parapsychologists call telepathy or precognition or ESP.
This sounds a medieval as the sorcerer working magic on a lock of hair, doesn’t it? Nonetheless, two physicists from Stanford Research International (now SRI International), Dr. Harold Puthoff and Dr. Russell Targ, in their book Mind Reach, offer it as an explanation of “distant viewing” (telepathy across thousands of miles.)
TIME TRAVEL
Even more bizarre, as Dr. Sarfatti has pointed out in many lectures, “information without transportation: could travel into the past. You see, in Relativity Theory, going faster than the speed of light seems impossible because it means going backwards in time. Some interpretations of Bell, however, suggest that information can indeed go backwards in time. This leads to speculations that have previously only appeared in science fiction, not in science.
For instance, it leads to the “Grandfather paradox.” Thus: if I had a time machine, went back to the 1890’s, and for some perverse reason murdered my grandfather before he could marry my grandmother, then when I came back to 1992 I wouldn’t find myself here, would I? Where would I exist, if I existed at all? It seems from a theoretical mathematic basis I would dwell in a parallel universe – one in which I remained sane enough not to go back in time to kill my granddad. But this universe, where poor old granddad, would still exist – except that my father and I wouldn’t live in it.
The same logic that governs such a sci-fi time machine applies to “information that moves faster than light.” If I could send Bell’s kind of information into the past, my grandfather might receive it. He might alter his actions in such a way that I wouldn’t get born in this universe anymore. I would have sent the information from the universe next door, so to speak.
If that doesn’t boggle your mind, consider a further development suggested by Dr. John Archibald Wheeler, often called the father of the Hydrogen bomb. In the Science Digest of October 1984, Dr. Wheeler suggests that the current and recent scientific experiments on atomic energy literally created this universe (or “selected” it out of all possible universes).
In other words, every time we meddle with an atomic system, according to Dr. Wheeler, the “non-local” effects go every which way into space and time, and some of them affect the nature of the Big Bang from which the universe emerged. You see, Dr. Wheeler has often argued that many, many universes emerged from the Big Bang – more than 10,000-million-million-million-million-million-million-million-million-million-million-million-million-million-

million-million-million-million-million of them, at least – all of them stacked up in parallel to ours in “super-space,” a geometrical construct he invented to solve some of the problems with General Relativity. Dr. Wheeler now argues, in the light of Bell’s Theorem, that we have, through our experiments, “fine-tuned” the Big Bang to produce the kind of universe in which we can exist and can conduct such experiments. Zillions and Zillions of other universes, without our meddling, evolve in different ways, and most of them collapse inward again very shortly after the Big Bang and thus never produce human beings.

SPACE AND TIME MIGHT NOT EVEN EXIST
Then we have Dr. Bohm’s third alternative: “Our concepts of space and time will have to be modified in some way we do not understand. “Many philosophers have examined this idea in the past – especially the Buddhists in the East and Bishop Berkeley and Immanuel Kant in Europe. All come to the same conclusion, basically. Space and time don’t exist “out there,” apart from us. The human brain just invented them to have a filing system for its impressions.
Dr. Nick Herbert presents a scientific form of this theory in his book, Quantum Reality. According to Dr. Herbert, all experience remains “local” (bound by space and time) but reality itself exists “non-locally” (not bound by space and time, or “transcendental”) in exactly the sense of all mystic teachings.
Dr. Bohm states the same idea in a more precise way. As he sees it, the universe may consist of an implicate order much like the software (programs) of a computer and an explicate order, much like the hardware – what we can see and experience – has locality. It remains here, not there, and now, not then. The implicative order or software, however – which we cannot see or experience but only deduce from our experiments and math – has total non-locality. It exists both here and there, both now and then.
In this model we do not need to posit information without transportation or any of the spook stuff. The information does not travel without a medium because it does not travel at all; it exists already, always, everywhere. In every electron, in every atom, in every molecule, every stone, every animal or person, every planet, every galaxy, however different their locations in space and time, the basic information, or universal blueprint (Bohm’s implicate order) remains the same.
This sounds very much like the Hindu concept of God or the Chinese Tao. In fact Bohm’s implicate order exactly fits Lao-Tse’s paradox of the Tao: “The greatest is within the smallest.” It also strikingly resembles the major axiom of Hermetic mysticism in the West: “That which is above is reflected in that which is below.”
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOUR BACK IS TURNED?

There remains one way to avoid all of these shocking and bizarre sounding interpretations of John S. Bell’s discovery. That way is to deny the first step of the argument – that we can posit an objective universe separate from our ideas. This path, thus far, has appeared only in the works of Dr. David Mermin of Columbia University. In two astounding papers – “Quantum Mysteries for Everyone” and “ Is the Moon There When Nobody Looks?”- Dr. Mermin argues that quantum physics (the physics of small particles, from which Bell began) finally makes sense if we assume the universe only exists when we look at it. If you don’t look at your automobile, and nobody else looks at it, it ceases to exist until somebody looks at it again. Then it pops back into reality – presto!
This theory, known as “solipsism,” has never appealed to scientists or philosophers, although a few cynics have always argued in favor of it, just to annoy the orthodox. Nobody seems to have ever taken it seriously – until now. Dr. Mermin soberly claims that solipsism leads to less absurd results than any other way of interpreting Bell’s math.
I don’t think Dr. Mermin intends to make a joke. He truly fins solipsism less unthinkable than ghostly information moving every which way in space and time with no medium to carry it, or parallel universes being created out of nothing whenever an atomic measurement is made, or the other alternatives that physicists are considering in trying to understand Bell’s theorem.

SCIENCE AND MYSTICISM JOINED?

In summary, Bell’s theorem does not prove the truth of the basic ideas of mysticism, but it definitely makes them seem more plausible than any previous scientific discovery did. Any alternative explanation of the non-local reality described by Bell does not bring us safely home to “common sense.” The other explanations sound even stranger than anything that mystics have ever claimed. We can only conclude, as the great biologist J.B.S. Haldane did after experimenting with yoga, that “The universe may be, not only queerer than we think, but queerer than we can think.”

+ Editor’s note: The Uncertainty Principle is that “the accurate measurement of one or two related, observable quantities, as position and momentum or energy and time, produce uncertainties in the measurement of the other, such that the product of the uncertainties of both quantities is equal to or greater than h / 2 pi, where h equals Plank’s constant. “ [ – from The Random House Dictionary of the Englaih Language]. Simply put, the principle means that you can know either the position or motion of a particle, but not both.

_______________

Poetry From The Past: Thomas Moore

Song
They may rail at this life — from the hour I began it

I found it a life full of kindness and bliss,

And until they can show me some happier planet,

More social and bright, I’ll content me with this.

As long as the world has such lips and such eyes

As before me this moment enraptur’d I see,

They may say what they will of the orbs in the skies,

But this earth is the planet for you, love, and me.
In Mercury’s star, where each moment can bring them

New sunshine and wit from the fountain on high,

Tho’ the nymphs may have livelier poets to sing them,

They’ve none, even there, more enamour’d than I.

And, as long as this harp can be waken’d to love,

And that eye its divine inspiration shall be,

They may talk as they will of their Edens above,

But this earth is the planet for you, love, and me.
In that star of the west, by whose shadowy splendour

At twilight so often we’ve roam’d thro’ the dew,

There are maidens, perhaps, who have bosoms as tender,

And look in their twilights as lovely as you.

But tho’ they were even more bright than the queen

Of that isle they inhabit in heaven’s blue sea,

As I never those fair young celestials have seen,

Why, this earth is the planet for you, love, and me.
As for those chilly orbs on the verge of creation,

Where sunshine and smiles must be equally rare,

Did they want a supply of cold hearts for that station,

Heav’n knows we have plenty on earth we could spare.

Oh! think what a world we should have of it here,

If the haters of peace, of affection, and glee,

Were to fly up to Saturn’s comfortless sphere,

And leave earth to such spirits as you, love, and me.

—
Come, Send Round the Wine

Come, send round the wine, and leave points of belief

To simpleton sages and reasoning fools;

This moment’s a flower too fair and brief

To be wither’d and stain’d by the dust of the schools.

Your glass may be purple, and mine may be blue,

But, while they are fill’d from the same bright bowl,

The fool who would quarrel for difference of hue,

Deserves not the comfort they shed o’er the soul.
Shall I ask the brave soldier, who fights by my side

In the cause of mankind, if our creeds agree?

Shall I give up the friend I have valued and tried,

If he kneel not before the same altar with me?

From the heretic girl of my soul should I fly?

To seek somewhere else a more orthodox kiss?

No, perish the hearts, and the laws that try

Truth, valour, or love, by a standard like this!

—

How Oft Has the Benshee Cried

How oft has the Benshee cried,

How oft has death untied

Bright links that Glory wove,

Sweet bonds entwined by Love.

Peace to each manly soul that sleepeth;

Rest to each faithful eye that weepeth;

Long may the fair and brave,

Sigh o’er the hero’s grave.
We’re fallen upon gloomy days!

Star after star decays.

Every bright name, that shed

Light o’er the land, is fled.

Dark falls the tear of him who mourneth

Lost joy, or hope that ne’er returneth:

But brightly flows the tear,

Wept o’er a hero’s bier.
Quench’d are our beacon lights —

Thou, of the Hundred Fights!

Thou, on whose burning tongue

Truth, peace, and freedom hung!

Both mute, — but long as valour shineth,

Or mercy’s soul at war repineth,

So long shall Erin’s pride

Tell how they lived and died

(Picture From an Exhibition: Golden Dawn – G.Llwydd)

This is a bit late getting out… but here ya are. Lots, and I mean lots on this entry… so with out further blather… I present the menu!
On The Menu:

Pictures From An Exhibition…. “The Samsara Engine” The Gallery Opening!

Koan: Flower Shower

Waterboys – Everyone Takes A Tumble…

Koan: The Giver Should Be Thankful

Zen Mind: The Poetry of Bassui

_________________
(Picture From An Exhibition: Mantis 1-G. Llwydd)

The Official Opening of ‘The Samsara Engine’ Exhibition at the Clinton Corner Cafe …
We had some brave 50 souls or so show up for the opening at the Cafe on Saturday night…
It was quite a varied crowd, from 10 month olds (Mr. Eildon) up to the late 60′s, college kids, some of Rowan’s friends, other artist, family in all its mutations and friends! Lots of friends!
We were scheduled for 5-7 but it went on past 9:30… It was interesting getting feedback on what I had been working on for so long. Many Earthriters were there… Miss Cymon made an appearance, Lyterphotos’ and his lovely family and friend, Victor and the Divine Miss Kim (Victors’ better half), Leana & Richard, PK who is an Earthrites graduate… There were many friends of Turfing as well, which was gratifying. Morgan Miller popped in, Doran, Tim and Leland were there in the corner goofing, and our neighbors Fritz, Cindy and their daughter as well.
It seem that it was a wonderful time had by all!
Miss Cymon and PK talking… This was Cymon’s first outing since her surgery at the end of August! She braved it out until the end. It was very nice to see her up and about, we were very happy to see her. PK showed up earlier at our house before the show when I was running around like a mad man… Collecting bamboo for picture frames….

The lovely Miss Carlie, with our nephew Ethan (on the left) and his twin, Andrew. Yeah, I know. anyway… (they did once look like each other) Carlie just got back from living in Rome for the summer studying architecture, and living the good life in Italy… Ethan and Andrew were very attentive to the cheese tray, and excited about the whole event. Two of the most enthusiastic young men that I know!

Mary and Julie greeting each other… Julies’ wonderful Mike is on the left behind, and her ex John on the right… We have known Julie and John since we first moved to Portland 15 years ago. Julie does some brilliant scientific research, (along with Mike) and John does environmental restoration in the local parks. Wonderful minds, and very good friends.

Leana and yours truly nattering away. I was so pleased that Leana and her husband Richard came to the opening! They moved up here from Berkeley and have been settling in to the South West Portland area….

If you want to visit the exhibition with me as a guide… just let me know via email. I will be happy to show you around. All the prints will be available on-line soon for purchase if you are interested!
Thanks a big bunch,
Gwyllm
(Picture From an Exhibition: Homage to Aldous -G. Llwydd)

_______
Koan: Flower Shower
Subhuti was Buddha’s disciple. He was able to understand the potency of emptiness, the viewpoint that nothing exists except in its relationship of subjectivity and objectivity.
One day Subhuti, in a mood of sublime emptiness, was sitting under a tree. Flowers began to fall about him.
“We are praising you for your discourse on emptiness,” the gods whispered to him.
“But I have not spoken of emptiness,” said Subhuti.
“You have not spoken of emptiness, we have not heard emptiness,” responded the gods. “This is the true emptiness.” And blossoms showered upon Subhuti as rain.
______
Waterboys – Everyone Takes A Tumble…

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Koan: The Giver Should Be Thankful
While Seisetsu was the master of Engaku in Kamakura he required larger quarters, since those in which he was teaching were overcrowded. Umezu Seibei, a merchant of Edo, decided to donate five hundred pieces of gold called ryo toward the construction of a more commodious school. This money he brought to the teacher.
Seisetsu said: “All right. I will take it.”
Umezu gave Seisetsu the sack of gold, but he was dissatisfied with the attitude of the teacher. One might live a whole year on three ryo, and the merchant had not even been thanked for five hundred.
“In that sack are five hundred ryo,” hinted Umezu.
“You told me that before,” replied Seisetsu.
“Even if I am a wealthy merchant, five hundred ryo is a lot of money,” said Umezu.
“Do you want me to thank you for it?” asked Seisetsu.
“You ought to,” replied Uzemu.
Why should I?” inquired Seisetsu. “The giver should be thankful.”

________
Zen Mind: The Poetry of Bassui

What is this mind?

Who is hearing these sounds?

Do not mistake any state for Self-realization.

Continue to ask yourself:

What is it that hears?

—
Who is hearing?

Your physical being doesn’t hear,

Nor does the void.

Then what does?

Strive to find out.

Put aside your rational Intellect,

Give up all techniques.

Just get rid of the notion of self.

—
Cast off what has been realized.

Turn back to the subject

That realizes

To the root bottom

And resolutely

Go on.

—
Just stop your wandering,

Look penetratingly

Into your inherent nature,

And, concentrating your Spiritual energy,

Sit in zazen

And break through.

—
Look directly!

What is this?

Look in this manner

And you won’t be fooled!

—

At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.

– Ernesto Che Guevara

40 years? Really? I am amazed at how the time flies. I was sitting with friends when the news came. I felt the breath go out of me when I heard. I was 16 years old, and the fall was coming on, while it was spring in Bolivia…
There had been much talk over the summer about the effort going on by Che and his band. Friends that I had who were part of what would later become the Venceremos Brigade were preparing to go to Cuba for the harvest. I had been invited to go earlier in the year with another volunteer group with other goals.
‘CIA’ everyone agreed they had hunted him down. Whether true or not, it was a fact that afternoon.
We all sat back, thinking our thoughts. We were silent for a very long time. It was not the best of days. Finally, I rolled a number, went out and watched the sun set over the Pacific sitting on the rocks overlooking the surf. The night descended in all its beauty, and the stars came out overhead.
Here is to you Ernesto, may your writings and your spirit survive.
Gwyllm
___________
Search Order

by Raúl Rivero
What are these gentlemen looking for

in my house?
What is this officer doing

reading the sheet of paper

on which I’ve written

the words “ambition,” “lightness,” and “brittle”?
What hint of conspiracy

speaks to him from the photo without a dedication

of my father in a guayabera (black tie)

in the fields of the National Capitol?
How does he interpret my certificates of divorce?
Where will his techniques of harassment lead him

when he reads the ten-line poems

and discovers the war wounds

of my great-grandfather?
Eight policemen

are examining the texts and drawings of my daughters,

and are infiltrating themselves into my emotional networks

and want to know where little Andrea sleeps

and what does her asthma have to do

with my carpets.
They want the code of a message from Zucu

in the upper part

of a cryptic text (here a light triumphal smile

of the comrade):

“Castles with music box. I won’t let the boy

hang out with the boogeyman. Jennie.”
A specialist in aporia came,

a literary critic with the rank of interim corporal

who examined at the point of a gun

the hills of poetry books.
Eight policemen

in my house

with a search order,

a clean operation,

a full victory

for the vanguard of the proletariat

who confiscated my Consul typewriter,

one hundred forty-two blank pages

and a sad and personal heap of papers

—the most perishable of the perishable

from this summer.

____________
Quotes from Ernesto….
We cannot be sure of having something to live for unless we are willing to die for it.- Ernesto Che Guevara
Hasta la victoria siempè! (Until victory always — Struggle until victory forever!) – Ernesto Che Guevara
If you tremble indignation at every injustice then you are a comrade of mine. – Ernesto Che Guevara
Words that do not match deeds are unimportant. – Ernesto Che Guevara
Cruel leaders are replaced only to have new leaders turn cruel! – Ernesto Che Guevara
I know you’ve come to kill me. Shoot, coward, you’re only going to kill a man. – Ernesto Che Guevara (just before he was shot and murdered)

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The Dictators

by Pablo Neruda
An odor has remained among the sugarcane:

a mixture of blood and body, a penetrating

petal that brings nausea.

Between the coconut palms the graves are full

of ruined bones, of speechless death-rattles.

The delicate dictator is talking

with top hats, gold braid, and collars.

The tiny palace gleams like a watch

and the rapid laughs with gloves on

cross the corridors at times

and join the dead voices

and the blue mouths freshly buried.

The weeping cannot be seen, like a plant

whose seeds fall endlessly on the earth,

whose large blind leaves grow even without light.

Hatred has grown scale on scale,

blow on blow, in the ghastly water of the swamp,

with a snout full of ooze and silence

Mary and I were at a local supermarket (Fred Meyers / Krogers) when we stumbled into the new British Import Section…. HP Sauce, Branston Pickle (bought some for Plowman’s Lunch!) Curry Sauces of various types, and yes ‘Spotted Dick’, Sponge Cake that is… Haven’t had it in some 20 years, but worth waiting another 20 years unless you get it fresh…
I am amazed actually how much markets have changed over the last 20 years, and the sheer variety of it all. Anyway, not to belabor the point and all that….
Heh.
On The Menu:

Yeats reads from Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931

Two Songs Of A Fool

Rowan is 17/ His Favourite Yeats Poem

Oisin’s Mother

Two More Poems From William Butler Yeats…

____________
Yeats reads from Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931

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Two Songs Of A Fool
I
A SPECKLED cat and a tame hare

Eat at my hearthstone

And sleep there;

And both look up to me alone

For learning and defence

As I look up to Providence.
I start out of my sleep to think

Some day I may forget

Their food and drink;

Or, the house door left unshut,

The hare may run till it’s found

The horn’s sweet note and the tooth of the hound.
I bear a burden that might well try

Men that do all by rule,

And what can I

That am a wandering witted fool

But pray to God that He ease

My great responsibilities.
II
I slept on my three-legged stool by the fire,

The speckled cat slept on my knee;

We never thought to enquire

Where the brown hare might be,

And whether the door were shut.

Who knows how she drank the wind

Stretched up on two legs from the mat,

Before she had settled her mind

To drum with her heel and to leap:

Had I but awakened from sleep

And called her name she had heard,

It may be, and had not stirred,

That now, it may be, has found

The horn’s sweet note and the tooth of the hound.

-William Butler Yeats…

____________
Rowan is now 17…

Rowan’s Favourite Yeats Poem:
The Song of Wandering Aengus
I WENT out to the hazel wood,

Because a fire was in my head,

And cut and peeled a hazel wand,

And hooked a berry to a thread;

And when white moths were on the wing,

And moth-like stars were flickering out,

I dropped the berry in a stream

And caught a little silver trout.
When I had laid it on the floor

I went to blow the fire a-flame,

But something rustled on the floor,

And some one called me by my name:

It had become a glimmering girl

With apple blossom in her hair

Who called me by my name and ran

And faded through the brightening air.
Though I am old with wandering

Through hollow lands and hilly lands,

I will find out where she has gone,

And kiss her lips and take her hands;

And walk among long dappled grass,

And pluck till time and times are done

The silver apples of the moon,

The golden apples of the sun.

_____________
Oisin’s Mother
CHAPTER I

Evening was drawing nigh, and the Fianna-Finn had decided to hunt no more that day. The hounds were whistled to heel, and a sober, homeward march began. For men will walk soberly in the evening, however they go in the day, and dogs will take the mood from their masters. They were pacing so, through the golden-shafted, tender-coloured eve, when a fawn leaped suddenly from covert, and, with that leap, all quietness vanished: the men shouted, the dogs gave tongue, and a furious chase commenced.
Fionn loved a chase at any hour, and, with Bran and Sceo’lan, he outstripped the men and dogs of his troop, until nothing remained in the limpid world but Fionn, the two hounds, and the nimble, beautiful fawn. These, and the occasional boulders, round which they raced, or over which they scrambled; the solitary tree which dozed aloof and beautiful in the path, the occasional clump of trees that hived sweet shadow as a hive hoards honey, and the rustling grass that stretched to infinity, and that moved and crept and swung under the breeze in endless, rhythmic billowings.
In his wildest moment Fionn was thoughtful, and now, although running hard, he was thoughtful. There was no movement of his beloved hounds that he did not know; not a twitch or fling of the head, not a cock of the ears or tail that was not significant to him. But on this chase whatever signs the dogs gave were not understood by their master.
He had never seen them in such eager flight. They were almost utterly absorbed in it, but they did not whine with eagerness, nor did they cast any glance towards him for the encouraging word which he never failed to give when they sought it.
They did look at him, but it was a look which he could not comprehend. There was a question and a statement in those deep eyes, and he could not understand what that question might be, nor what it was they sought to convey. Now and again one of the dogs turned a head in full flight, and stared, not at Fionn, but distantly backwards, over the spreading and swelling plain where their companions of the hunt had disappeared. “They are looking for the other hounds,” said Fionn.
“And yet they do not give tongue! Tongue it, a Vran!” he shouted, “Bell it out, a Heo’lan!”
It was then they looked at him, the look which he could not understand and had never seen on a chase. They did not tongue it, nor bell it, but they added silence to silence and speed to speed, until the lean grey bodies were one pucker and lashing of movement.
Fionn marvelled. “They do not want the other dogs to hear or to come on this chase,” he murmured, and he wondered what might be passing within those slender heads.
“The fawn runs well,” his thought continued. “What is it, a Vran, my heart? After her, a Heo’lan! Hist and away, my loves!”
“There is going and to spare in that beast yet,” his mind went on. “She is not stretched to the full, nor half stretched. She may outrun even Bran,” he thought ragingly.
They were racing through a smooth valley in a steady, beautiful, speedy flight when, suddenly, the fawn stopped and lay on the grass, and it lay with the calm of an animal that has no fear, and the leisure of one that is not pressed.
“Here is a change,” said Fionn, staring in astonishment.
“She is not winded,” he said. “What is she lying down for?” But Bran and Sceo’lan did not stop; they added another inch to their long-stretched easy bodies, and came up on the fawn.
“It is an easy kill,” said Fionn regretfully. “They have her,” he cried.
But he was again astonished, for the dogs did not kill. They leaped and played about the fawn, licking its face, and rubbing delighted noses against its neck.
Fionn came up then. His long spear was lowered in his fist at the thrust, and his sharp knife was in its sheath, but he did not use them, for the fawn and the two hounds began to play round him, and the fawn was as affectionate towards him as the hounds were; so that when a velvet nose was thrust in his palm, it was as often a fawn’s muzzle as a hound’s.
In that joyous company he came to wide Allen of Leinster, where the people were surprised to see the hounds and the fawn and the Chief and none other of the hunters that had set out with them.
When the others reached home, the Chief told of his chase, and it was agreed that such a fawn must not be killed, but that it should be kept and well treated, and that it should be the pet fawn of the Fianna. But some of those who remembered Bran’s parentage thought that as Bran herself had come from the Shi so this fawn might have come out of the Shi also.

CHAPTER II

Late that night, when he was preparing for rest, the door of Fionn’s chamber opened gently and a young woman came into the room. The captain stared at her, as he well might, for he had never seen or imagined to see a woman so beautiful as this was. Indeed, she was not a woman, but a young girl, and her bearing was so gently noble, her look so modestly high, that the champion dared scarcely look at her, although he could not by any means have looked away.
As she stood within the doorway, smiling, and shy as a flower, beautifully timid as a fawn, the Chief communed with his heart.
“She is the Sky-woman of the Dawn,” he said. “She is the light on the foam. She is white and odorous as an apple-blossom. She smells of spice and honey. She is my beloved beyond the women of the world. She shall never be taken from me.”
And that thought was delight and anguish to him: delight because of such sweet prospect, anguish because it was not yet realised, and might not be.
As the dogs had looked at him on the chase with a look that he did not understand, so she looked at him, and in her regard there was a question that baffled him and a statement which he could not follow.
He spoke to her then, mastering his heart to do it.
“I do not seem to know you,” he said.
“You do not know me indeed,” she replied.
“It is the more wonderful,” he continued gently, “for I should know every person that is here. What do you require from me?”
“I beg your protection, royal captain.”
“I give that to all,” he answered. “Against whom do you desire protection?”
“I am in terror of the Fear Doirche.”
“The Dark Man of the Shi?”
“He is my enemy,” she said.
“He is mine now,” said Fionn. “Tell me your story.”
“My name is Saeve, and I am a woman of Faery,” she commenced. “In the Shi’ many men gave me their love, but I gave my love to no man of my country.”
“That was not reasonable,” the other chided with a blithe heart.
“I was contented,” she replied, “and what we do not want we do not lack. But if my love went anywhere it went to a mortal, a man of the men of Ireland.”
“By my hand,” said Fionn in mortal distress, “I marvel who that man can be!”
“He is known to you,” she murmured. “I lived thus in the peace of Faery, hearing often of my mortal champion, for the rumour of his great deeds had gone through the Shi’, until a day came when the Black Magician of the Men of God put his eye on me, and, after that day, in whatever direction I looked I saw his eye.”
She stopped at that, and the terror that was in her heart was on her face. “He is everywhere,” she whispered. “He is in the bushes, and on the hill. He looked up at me from the water, and he stared down on me from the sky. His voice commands out of the spaces, and it demands secretly in the heart. He is not here or there, he is in all places at all times. I cannot escape from him,” she said, “and I am afraid,” and at that she wept noiselessly and stared on Fionn.
“He is my enemy,” Fionn growled. “I name him as my enemy.”
“You will protect me,” she implored.
“Where I am let him not come,” said Fionn. “I also have knowledge. I am Fionn, the son of Uail, the son of Baiscne, a man among men and a god where the gods are.”
“He asked me in marriage,” she continued, “but my mind was full of my own dear hero, and I refused the Dark Man.”
“That was your right, and I swear by my hand that if the man you desire is alive and unmarried he shall marry you or he will answer to me for the refusal.”
“He is not married,” said Saeve, “and you have small control over him.” The Chief frowned thoughtfully. “Except the High King and the kings I have authority in this land.”
“What man has authority over himself?” said Saeve.
“Do you mean that I am the man you seek?” said Fionn.
“It is to yourself I gave my love,” she replied. “This is good news,” Fionn cried joyfully, “for the moment you came through the door I loved and desired you, and the thought that you wished for another man went into my heart like a sword.” Indeed, Fionn loved Saeve as he had not loved a woman before and would never love one again. He loved her as he had never loved anything before. He could not bear to be away from her. When he saw her he did not see the world, and when he saw the world without her it was as though he saw nothing, or as if he looked on a prospect that was bleak and depressing. The belling of a stag had been music to Fionn, but when Saeve spoke that was sound enough for him. He had loved to hear the cuckoo calling in the spring from the tree that is highest in the hedge, or the blackbird’s jolly whistle in an autumn bush, or the thin, sweet enchantment that comes to the mind when a lark thrills out of sight in the air and the hushed fields listen to the song. But his wife’s voice was sweeter to Fionn than the singing of a lark. She filled him with wonder and surmise. There was magic in the tips of her fingers. Her thin palm ravished him. Her slender foot set his heart beating; and whatever way her head moved there came a new shape of beauty to her face.
“She is always new,” said Fionn. “She is always better than any other woman; she is always better than herself.”
He attended no more to the Fianna. He ceased to hunt. He did not listen to the songs of poets or the curious sayings of magicians, for all of these were in his wife, and something that was beyond these was in her also.
“She is this world and the next one; she is completion,” said Fionn.

CHAPTER III

It happened that the men of Lochlann came on an expedition against Ireland. A monstrous fleet rounded the bluffs of Ben Edair, and the Danes landed there, to prepare an attack which would render them masters of the country. Fionn and the Fianna-Finn marched against them. He did not like the men of Lochlann at any time, but this time he moved against them in wrath, for not only were they attacking Ireland, but they had come between him and the deepest joy his life had known.
It was a hard fight, but a short one. The Lochlannachs were driven back to their ships, and within a week the only Danes remaining in Ireland were those that had been buried there.
That finished, he left the victorious Fianna and returned swiftly to the plain of Allen, for he could not bear to be one unnecessary day parted from Saeve.
“You are not leaving us!” exclaimed Goll mac Morna.
“I must go,” Fionn replied.
“You will not desert the victory feast,” Conan reproached him.
“Stay with us, Chief,” Caelte begged.
“What is a feast without Fionn?” they complained.
But he would not stay.
“By my hand,” he cried, “I must go. She will be looking for me from the window.”
“That will happen indeed,” Goll admitted.
“That will happen,” cried Fionn. “And when she sees me far out on the plain, she will run through the great gate to meet me.”
“It would be the queer wife would neglect that run,” Cona’n growled.
“I shall hold her hand again,” Fionn entrusted to Caelte’s ear.
“You will do that, surely.”
“I shall look into her face,” his lord insisted. But he saw that not even beloved Caelte understood the meaning of that, and he knew sadly and yet proudly that what he meant could not be explained by any one and could not be comprehended by any one.
“You are in love, dear heart,” said Caelte.
“In love he is,” Cona’n grumbled. “A cordial for women, a disease for men, a state of wretchedness.”
“Wretched in truth,” the Chief murmured. “Love makes us poor We have not eyes enough to see all that is to be seen, nor hands enough to seize the tenth of all we want. When I look in her eyes I am tormented because I am not looking at her lips, and when I see her lips my soul cries out, ‘Look at her eyes, look at her eyes.’”
“That is how it happens,” said Goll rememberingly.
“That way and no other,” Caelte agreed.
And the champions looked backwards in time on these lips and those, and knew their Chief would go.
When Fionn came in sight of the great keep his blood and his feet quickened, and now and again he waved a spear in the air.
“She does not see me yet,” he thought mournfully.
“She cannot see me yet,” he amended, reproaching himself.
But his mind was troubled, for he thought also, or he felt without thinking, that had the positions been changed he would have seen her at twice the distance.
“She thinks I have been unable to get away from the battle, or that I was forced to remain for the feast.”
And, without thinking it, he thought that had the positions been changed he would have known that nothing could retain the one that was absent.
“Women,” he said, “are shamefaced, they do not like to appear eager when others are observing them.”
But he knew that he would not have known if others were observing him, and that he would not have cared about it if he had known. And he knew that his Saeve would not have seen, and would not have cared for any eyes than his.
He gripped his spear on that reflection, and ran as he had not run in his life, so that it was a panting, disheveled man that raced heavily through the gates of the great Dun.
Within the Dun there was disorder. Servants were shouting to one another, and women were running to and fro aimlessly, wringing their hands and screaming; and, when they saw the Champion, those nearest to him ran away, and there was a general effort on the part of every person to get behind every other person. But Fionn caught the eye of his butler, Gariv Crona’n, the Rough Buzzer, and held it.
“Come you here,” he said.
And the Rough Buzzer came to him without a single buzz in his body.
“Where is the Flower of Allen?” his master demanded.
“I do not know, master,” the terrified servant replied.
“You do not know!” said Fionn. “Tell what you do know.”
And the man told him this story.

CHAPTER IV

“When you had been away for a day the guards were surprised. They were looking from the heights of the Dun, and the Flower of Allen was with them. She, for she had a quest’s eye, called out that the master of the Fianna was coming over the ridges to the Dun, and she ran from the keep to meet you.”
“It was not I,” said Fionn.
“It bore your shape,” replied Gariv Cronan. “It had your armour and your face, and the dogs, Bran and Sceo’lan, were with it.”
“They were with me,” said Fionn.
“They seemed to be with it,” said the servant humbly
“Tell us this tale,” cried Fionn.
“We were distrustful,” the servant continued. “We had never known Fionn to return from a combat before it had been fought, and we knew you could not have reached Ben Edar or encountered the Lochlannachs. So we urged our lady to let us go out to meet you, but to remain herself in the Dun.”
“It was good urging,” Fionn assented.
“She would not be advised,” the servant wailed. “She cried to us, ‘Let me go to meet my love’.”
“Alas!” said Fionn.
“She cried on us, ‘Let me go to meet my husband, the father of the child that is not born.’”
“Alas!” groaned deep-wounded Fionn. “She ran towards your appearance that had your arms stretched out to her.”
At that wise Fionn put his hand before his eyes, seeing all that happened.
“Tell on your tale,” said he.
“She ran to those arms, and when she reached them the figure lifted its hand. It touched her with a hazel rod, and, while we looked, she disappeared, and where she had been there was a fawn standing and shivering. The fawn turned and bounded towards the gate of the Dun, but the hounds that were by flew after her.”
Fionn stared on him like a lost man.
“They took her by the throat–”the shivering servant whispered.
“Ah!” cried Fionn in a terrible voice.
“And they dragged her back to the figure that seemed to be Fionn. Three times she broke away and came bounding to us, and three times the dogs took her by the throat and dragged her back.”
“You stood to look!” the Chief snarled.
“No, master, we ran, but she vanished as we got to her; the great hounds vanished away, and that being that seemed to be Fionn disappeared with them. We were left in the rough grass, staring about us and at each other, and listening to the moan of the wind and the terror of our hearts.”
“Forgive us, dear master,” the servant cried. But the great captain made him no answer. He stood as though he were dumb and blind, and now and again he beat terribly on his breast with his closed fist, as though he would kill that within him which should be dead and could not die. He went so, beating on his breast, to his inner room in the Dun, and he was not seen again for the rest of that day, nor until the sun rose over Moy Life’ in the morning.

CHAPTER V

For many years after that time, when he was not fighting against the enemies of Ireland, Fionn was searching and hunting through the length and breadth of the country in the hope that he might again chance on his lovely lady from the Shi’. Through all that time he slept in misery each night and he rose each day to grief. Whenever he hunted he brought only the hounds that he trusted, Bran and Sceo’lan, Lomaire, Brod, and Lomlu; for if a fawn was chased each of these five great dogs would know if that was a fawn to be killed or one to be protected, and so there was small danger to Saeve and a small hope of finding her.
Once, when seven years had passed in fruitless search, Fionn and the chief nobles of the Fianna were hunting Ben Gulbain. All the hounds of the Fianna were out, for Fionn had now given up hope of encountering the Flower of Allen. As the hunt swept along the sides of the hill there arose a great outcry of hounds from a narrow place high on the slope and, over all that uproar there came the savage baying of Fionn’s own dogs.
“What is this for?” said Fionn, and with his companions he pressed to the spot whence the noise came.
“They are fighting all the hounds of the Fianna,” cried a champion.
And they were. The five wise hounds were in a circle and were giving battle to an hundred dogs at once. They were bristling and terrible, and each bite from those great, keen jaws was woe to the beast that received it. Nor did they fight in silence as was their custom and training, but between each onslaught the great heads were uplifted, and they pealed loudly, mournfully, urgently, for their master.
“They are calling on me,” he roared.
And with that he ran, as he had only once before run, and the men who were nigh to him went racing as they would not have run for their lives. They came to the narrow place on the slope of the mountain, and they saw the five great hounds in a circle keeping off the other dogs, and in the middle of the ring a little boy was standing. He had long, beautiful hair, and he was naked. He was not daunted by the terrible combat and clamour of the hounds. He did not look at the hounds, but he stared like a young prince at Fionn and the champions as they rushed towards him scattering the pack with the butts of their spears. When the fight was over, Bran and Sceo’lan ran whining to the little boy and licked his hands.
“They do that to no one,” said a bystander. “What new master is this they have found?”
Fionn bent to the boy. “Tell me, my little prince and pulse, what your name is, and how you have come into the middle of a hunting-pack, and why you are naked?”
But the boy did not understand the language of the men of Ireland. He put bis hand into Fionn’s, and the Chief felt as if that little hand had been put into his heart. He lifted the lad to his great shoulder.
“We have caught something on this hunt,” said he to Caelte mac Rongn. “We must bring this treasure home. You shall be one of the Fianna-Finn, my darling,” he called upwards.
The boy looked down on him, and in the noble trust and fearlessness of that regard Fionn’s heart melted away.
“My little fawn!” he said.
And he remembered that other fawn. He set the boy between his knees and stared at him earnestly and long.
“There is surely the same look,” he said to his wakening heart; “that is the very eye of Saeve.”
The grief flooded out of his heart as at a stroke, and joy foamed into it in one great tide. He marched back singing to the encampment, and men saw once more the merry Chief they had almost forgotten.

CHAPTER VI

Just as at one time he could not be parted from Saeve, so now he could not be separated from this boy. He had a thousand names for him, each one more tender than the last: “My Fawn, My Pulse, My Secret Little Treasure,” or he would call him “My Music, My Blossoming Branch, My Store in the Heart, My Soul.” And the dogs were as wild for the boy as Fionn was. He could sit in safety among a pack that would have torn any man to pieces, and the reason was that Bran and Sceo’lan, with their three whelps, followed him about like shadows. When he was with the pack these five were with him, and woeful indeed was the eye they turned on their comrades when these pushed too closely or were not properly humble. They thrashed the pack severally and collectively until every hound in Fionn’s kennels knew that the little lad was their master, and that there was nothing in the world so sacred as he was.
In no long time the five wise hounds could have given over their guardianship, so complete was the recognition of their young lord. But they did not so give over, for it was not love they gave the lad but adoration.
Fionn even may have been embarrassed by their too close attendance. If he had been able to do so he might have spoken harshly to his dogs, but he could not; it was unthinkable that he should; and the boy might have spoken harshly to him if he had dared to do it. For this was the order of Fionn’s affection: first there was the boy; next, Bran and Sceo’lan with their three whelps; then Caelte mac Rona’n, and from him down through the champions. He loved them all, but it was along that precedence his affections ran. The thorn that went into Bran’s foot ran into Fionn’s also. The world knew it, and there was not a champion but admitted sorrowfully that there was reason for his love.
Little by little the boy came to understand their speech and to speak it himself, and at last he was able to tell his story to Fionn.
There were many blanks in the tale, for a young child does not remember very well. Deeds grow old in a day and are buried in a night. New memories come crowding on old ones, and one must learn to forget as well as to remember. A whole new life had come on this boy, a life that was instant and memorable, so that his present memories blended into and obscured the past, and he could not be quite sure if that which he told of had happened in this world or in the world he had left.

CHAPTER VII

“I used to live,” he said, “in a wide, beautiful place. There were hills and valleys there, and woods and streams, but in whatever direction I went I came always to a cliff, so tall it seemed to lean against the sky, and so straight that even a goat would not have imagined to climb it.”
“I do not know of any such place,” Fionn mused.
“There is no such place in Ireland,” said Caelte, “but in the Shi’ there is such a place.”
“There is in truth,” said Fionn.
“I used to eat fruits and roots in the summer,” the boy continued, “but in the winter food was left for me in a cave.”
“Was there no one with you?” Fionn asked.
“No one but a deer that loved me, and that I loved.”
“Ah me!” cried Fionn in anguish, “tell me your tale, my son.”
“A dark stern man came often after us, and he used to speak with the deer. Sometimes he talked gently and softly and coaxingly, but at times again he would shout loudly and in a harsh, angry voice. But whatever way he talked the deer would draw away from him in dread, and he always left her at last furiously.”
“It is the Dark Magician of the Men of God,” cried Fionn despairingly.
“It is indeed, my soul,” said Caelte.
“The last time I saw the deer,” the child continued, “the dark man was speaking to her. He spoke for a long time. He spoke gently and angrily, and gently and angrily, so that I thought he would never stop talking, but in the end he struck her with a hazel rod, so that she was forced to follow him when he went away. She was looking back at me all the time and she was crying so bitterly that any one would pity her. I tried to follow her also, but I could not move, and I cried after her too, with rage and grief, until I could see her no more and hear her no more. Then I fell on the grass, my senses went away from me, and when I awoke I was on the hill in the middle of the hounds where you found me.”
That was the boy whom the Fianna called Oisi’n, or the Little Fawn. He grew to be a great fighter afterwards, and he was the chief maker of poems in the world. But he was not yet finished with the Shi. He was to go back into Faery when the time came, and to come thence again to tell these tales, for it was by him these tales were told.

___________

Two More Poems From William Butler Yeats…

THE CAP AND BELLS
THE jester walked in the garden:

The garden had fallen still;

He bade his soul rise upward

And stand on her window-sill.
It rose in a straight blue garment,

When owls began to call:

It had grown wise-tongued by thinking

Of a quiet and light footfall;
But the young queen would not listen;

She rose in her pale night gown;

She drew in the heavy casement

And pushed the latches down.
He bade his heart go to her,

When the owls called out no more;

In a red and quivering garment

It sang to her through the door.
It had grown sweet-tongued by dreaming,

Of a flutter of flower-like hair;

But she took up her fan from the table

And waved it off on the air.
“I have cap and bells,” he pondered,

“I will send them to her and die”;

And when the morning whitened

He left them where she went by.
She laid them upon her bosom,

Under a cloud of her hair,

And her red lips sang them a love-song:

Till stars grew out of the air.
She opened her door and her window,

And the heart and the soul came through,

To her right hand came the red one,

To her left hand came the blue.
They set up a noise like crickets,

A chattering wise and sweet,

And her hair was a folded flower

And the quiet of love in her feet.

—
THE BLESSED
CUMHAL called out, bending his head,

Till Dathi came and stood,

With a blink in his eyes at the cave mouth,

Between the wind and the wood.
And Cumhal said, bending his knees,

“I have come by the windy way

To gather the half of your blessedness

And learn to pray when you pray.
“I can bring you salmon out of the streams

And heron out of the skies.”

But Dathi folded his hands and smiled

With the secrets of God in his eyes.
And Cumhal saw like a drifting smoke

All manner of blessed souls,

Women and children, young men with books,

And old men with croziers and stoles.
“Praise God and God’s mother,” Dathi said,

“For God and God’s mother have sent

The blessedest souls that walk in the world

To fill your heart with content.” p. 35
“And which is the blessedest,” Cumhal said,

“Where all are comely and good?

Is it these that with golden thuribles

Are singing about the wood?”
“My eyes are blinking,” Dathi said,

“With the secrets of God half blind,

But I can see where the wind goes

And follow the way of the wind;
“And blessedness goes where the wind goes,

And when it is gone we are dead;

I see the blessedest soul in the world

And he nods a drunken head.
“O blessedness comes in the night and the day

And whither the wise heart knows;

And one has seen in the redness of wine

The Incorruptible Rose,
“That drowsily drops faint leaves on him

And the sweetness of desire,

While time and the world are ebbing away

In twilights of dew and of fire.”

(Seraphim -The Guide)

Another illustration being featured at the “Samsara Engine” Exhibition… This one came in 3 waves over 2 years or so. I stumbled over the original illustration in a book from the 19th century illustrating Moorish architecture… The rest of it built up over time.
Dropped off the last bits of Print and other stuff to Clinton Corner Cafe today. I am always a bit un-organized when it comes to setting things up.
(Japanese Garden – Forest Park, Portland)

We have by-passed Autumn and gone directly to winter here in Portland… Leaves are dropping like mad, and the sky is doing its best to imitate a Turner painting… my heart catches in my chest with the beauty of this place….. I was out in the neighborhood today, talking to friends, stopping by the bakery. The air is so chill now. The promised Indian Summer never came…..
Have a great one!
Bright Blessings!
Gwyllm

________
A Celtic Blessing
May the light of your soul guide you.

May the light of your soul bless the work that you do

with the secret love and warmth of your heart.

May you see in what you do the beauty of your own soul.

May the sacredness of your work bring healing, light

and renewal to those who work with you

and to those who see and receive your work.

May your work never weary you.

May it release within you wellsprings of

refreshment, inspiration and excitement.

May you be present in what you do.

May you never become lost in bland absences.

May the day never burden.

May dawn find you awake and alert,

approaching your new day with dreams, possibilities and promises.

May evening find you gracious and fulfilled.

May you go into the night blessed, sheltered and protected.

May your soul calm, console and renew you.

____________
On The Menu:

The Links

Art & Music – Garden Of Pleasure

The Horrow on Howth Hill

Poetry From Morocco: Fatiha Morchid

Mandelbrot Animation – Fractal Music – Psilocybin

_________________

__________
The Links:

Eye Tattooing?

[Guest Blogger] Peter Gorman: 25 Years of Shamanism (Part 1)

Limbaugh offering inconsistent explanations for “phony soldiers” comment

Maxims Sex War

BlackWaterGate

_____________

Art & Music – Garden Of Pleasure

=en_US&fs=1&”>

_____________
The Horrow on Howth Hill

by Pope Robert Anton Wilson

contribution to the SubGenius anthology Three-Fisted Tales of “Bob”
It was the rains, I swear–the interminable, unspeakable Irish rain–that drove us over the edge. My old Gothic castle, located high atop the hill of Howth facing Dublin Bay, was not only damp, dank and dark (due to the omnipresent clouds) but rapidly becoming decadent noisome and foetid. In fact, it looked like the set for a Bela Lugosi film–an appropriate scene, I thought later, for the terrible encounter of Professor de Selby1 and J. R. “Bob” Dobbs.
The rain had gone on for two months this time, bringing a clammy, enervating muskiness to everything. In the library, even the pages of my prized German translation of the banned and forbidden Necronomicon (Das Verichteraraberbuch, von Juntz, 1848) and de Selby’s disturbing and debatable Teratologica Ontologicum were sticking together unwholesomely.
Rancid, the butler, was falling-down drunk every day and I could hardly blame him. The maid–dark, sensuous Immaculata and blonde, buxom Concepcion–were not only dykes, as I suspected from the first, but speed freaks as well.They spent all day in their room, injecting and 69ing, injecting and 69ing. They totally neglected their duties and the entire castle had begun to look like the bottom of a box where the cat had kittens. Adam, the gardener, had been tripping his brains out on LSD since the third week of the rains and the grounds had the eldritch and nameless appearance of the swamps of Yuggoth redesigned by Salvador Dali. If the damnable downpour did not cease soon, I feared that we all should become mad. I think I myself would have been sunk in lethargy and existential despair if it were not for my mescaline and XTC stashes.
Worst of all, it was drawing near the aeon-cursed Walpurgis Night, and Professor de Selby had come to pay his annual visit again.
Of course, I personally have always liked de Selby, who is not at all a bad chap in his own weird way. But he lives always, not just in the turmoil of academic controversy, but in the epicenter of a veritable spider’s web of clandestine operations: where de Selby walks, the CIA and KGB are sure to skulk close behind, and the IRA and even the PLO may be showing interest also, not to mention the Knights of Malta2 the Illuminati3, the Priory of Sion4, the Campus Crusade for Cthulhu5 and other secret societies and cults whose reputations are unsavory and whose goals remain inscrutable to ordinary wholesome men and women. Some of these types would be beyond the comprehension of the Los Angeles Vice Squad or the specialists in abnormal psychology at the Kinsey Institute, I swear.
As usual, de Selby has a new obsession this year. He is determined to discover the exact dimensions of the penis of a fictitious gorilla. Any ordinary scholar, however eccentric, might decide to write a paper on the dimensions of the wingwang of a real gorilla, dead or alive, but de Selby wants to discover the magnitude of the Willy of a gorilla who never really existed at all–King Kong in the famous horror film of 1933. Naturally, being de Selby, he has reasons for this which no normal person can understand6. He says 1932 (when King Kong was being produced) was a pivot in evolution, in some mystic sense that only he comprehends.
“In 1932,” he was telling me at breakfast this moming, “Alice Pleasance Liddell died, and so did John Stanislaus Joyce.”
“Who the hell were they?” I asked irritably.
“Alice P. Liddell,” he said somberly, “was the model for Alice in Wonderland. Charles Dodgson and/or Lewis Carroll–the world’s most successful dual personality–loved her um ah er ‘not wisely but too well.’ Too well, at any rate, to avoid the speculations of Freudians. And John Stanislaus Joyce was the father of James Joyce. Do you see the connection?”
I admitted that the linkage evaded me.
“Alice Pleasance Liddell or APL,” de Selby said simply, “is one aspect of Anna Livia Plurabelle or ALP, the superwoman who contains all women, in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.”
“Oh,” I said. It seemed the only adequate comment.
“I have wondered,” de Selby went on, “if one can equate APL with ALP on Cabalistic grounds, since both equal 111, what of PLA7? But that is an irrelevance, I’ve decided. What is important is that in 1932 not only did Alice P. Liddell and John S. Joyce die, but the atom was split for the first time, and the 92nd chemical element was discovered–the last natural element, you see. For the first time in history humanity had access ta the energy of the stars and possessed a full catalog of the basic building blocks of the universe. And, of course, Roosevelt II was elected in America, and Hitler in Germany, that very same year, 1932, which incidentally adds numerologically to 15, the number of the Devil card in the Tarot. King Kong, you see, had to emerge from the collective unconscious at exactly that point, especially since Cary Grant was 28 years old on January 18 that year.”
De Selby went on in that vein for quite a while, but I sort of lost the thread of his argument–something that often happens to readers of his books, as numerous critics have complained. All I could ever remember afterwards was that Cary Grant was 28 when I was born and 28 is a number connected with menstruation, the ancient Celtic moon goddess, Bridget, and the synchronous link from Lewis Carroll’s obsession with premenstmal girls to Cary Grant’s habit of avoiding the Academy Award dinners, staying home, taking LSD and watching the award ceremonies on TV while “laughing uncontrollably and jumping up and down on the bed,” according to the testimony in his third divorce trial.
Eventually, we finished our leisurely breakfast, it was ten thirty and the pubs opened, so de Selby put on his brown mackintosh (he seems to have worn it since 1904, 1 think) and sallied forth in search of Irish Inspiration.
I went to the study and tried again to work on my new science-fiction novel, Wigner’s Friend, which deals with a parallel universe where de Selby is Pope and Adolf Hitler migrated to the United States and became a popular writer of Western movies. As usual lately, my creativity was dampened by the depressing rain, the eldritch, unhallowed and Peter Lorre-like giggles of the gardener after his day’s dose of LSD took effect and the strange, foetid and nameless fungi that have grown on the fumiture since the maids got hooked on methamphetamines and stopped even pretending to clean up.
Rancid, the butler, lurched into the study, staggered, knocked over a Ming vase, puked into the potted fern, and asked if I needed anything. I sent him away with no rancor. He was too drunk to understand anything I said, anyway. I did wish, however, that he looked a little less like Boris Karlolfi as the alcoholic land eventually homicidal) butler in The Old Dark House. The rain continued to fall and the sky remained overcast and gloomy, turning my thoughts to the most morbid subjects imaginable. I was actually happy when de Selby returned, in a car driven by an American tourist he had met at the Royal Howth, a Mr. J. R. “Bob” Dobbs.
“Bob,” de Selby said grandly, “meet “Bob.” ” I could see that de Selby had put away at least five or six pints of Guinness stout already, and I tried not to become uneasy or let my imagination run riot over the simple fact that “Bob” had a Campus Crusade for Cthulhu bumper sticker on his Toyota. Americans often have a strange sense of humor. Nonetheless, as we entered the castle, I looked back at the car and shuddered involuntarily at the other words on the bumper:
Have you hugged your shoggoth today?
We went to my study, where de Sel
by, with his usual exhuberant Celtic generosity, opened a bottle of my best Tullamore Dew and offered a healthy double shot to “Bob.” I was pleased when he offered some to me, too.
” “Bob” has some real data on Kong’s dong,” de Selby began at once, finishing the rest of the bottle in a gulp.
I raised an enquiring eyebrow, a trick I had learned from Basil Rathbone movies. “Bob” was busy relighting his Pipe for a moment but then he spoke in a mellow Texas drawl.
“The average man,” he said, “stands between about five foot eight and about six foot, right? And the average human erection, at least according to my wife, “Connie”–who is more of an expert on males in heat than I am–is between five and seven inches. The nine-inchers and twelve-inchers you see occasionally in porn movies are freaks of nature, like Watusis or basketball players who can be seven or eight feet tall. Follow me? So the average human male, statistically, has about six inches. Kay? Now in the case of Kong, we have an anthropoid standing at least twenty-four feet tall, as you can judge by the scene in the theater. That means he would have about four times as much as a man of six feet. Four times six is twenty-four, so Kong had twenty-four inches or two feet.”
“No wonder Fay Wray did so much screaming,” I said. “She’d be in the position of the young lady from Sidney in the limerick.” De Selby raised an enquiring eyebrow (he’s seen a lot of Basil Rathbone movies, tool and courteously opened another bottle of my Tullamore Dew. To explain my remark, I recited the immortal lines from Tennyson:
There was a young lady from Sidney

Who like it right up to her kidney

A man from Quebec

Shoved it up to her neck

He had a big one, didn’t he?
De Selby refilled our glasses all around and sat down in an easy chair. He looked troubled.
“Well,” I said to him cheerfully. “Your mystery is solved. There’s no prob with “Bob.” “
“I don’t know,” the Sage of Dalkey replied thoughtfully. “We may be approaching this matter from the wrong angle entirely. “Bob” is treating Kong as a creature in biology, which is emphatically what the Big Fellow is not at all, at all. Kong is a creature in mythology, in um ah er the collective unconscious.”
“Why, sure,” said “Bob” quickly. “Hellfire, boy, there ain’t no twenty-four-foot gorillas in the real world. But if we grant that, for argument’s sake, how in hell do we reason about Kong at all? What are the dimensions of a myth, a dream, a Special Effect? Tell me that.” And he grabbed the Tullamore Dew and poured another hearty slug. I could see we were in for a day of heavy going.
“Well,” de Selby said, “we must take our clues from the records of the collective unconscious itself. Kong is a Nature Divinity, to say the least of it, and, considering his um concupiscence–that means horniness in American, “Bob”–he’s more specifically a Fertility God. We must approach this from the perspective of patapsychology .”
“What are you getting at?” I asked uneasily. In the distance, a dog barked and, further off, there was an ominous rumble of thunder.
“Well,” de Selby said. “We know one thing about Fertility Gods. Anthropologists call them ithyphallique and not without reason. They make the studs in porn movies look puny by comparison. Osiris is portrayed in Egyptian art as having about three times as much Willy as one would expect in a man, or god, of his size. In Greece, Hermes was usually depicted with a tool almost the size of his body-why, statues of him look almost like a bureau with the middle drawer pulled all the way out. As for Finn Mac Cool, some of the most powerful verses in the Finn epic–the most beautiful lines of Gaelic in our tradition, although usually expunged in English translation–describe him as, well, virtually a pole-vaulter with a built-in pole.”
“Why, hell’s bells, son,” said “Bob” chortling, “that’s the most persistent of all legends. When I was young everybody in the States believed Dillinger had twenty-three inches and it was preserved in alcohol at the Smithsonian after his death. Later on, the myth got attached to an actor named Errol Flynn. Long cmllers, the kind you call Berliners over here, were called Errol Flynns.”
“Say,” I interrupted, smitten with whimsy, “when John Fitzgerald Kennedy went to Germany and said, ‘Ich bin ein Berliner,’ was he just being diplomatic, or was he bragging?”
They ignored me. “Dillinger and Mr. Flynn had become semidivine in folklore,” de Selby said, pouring more Tullamore Dew, “and so naturally they were expected to have semidivine prongs, two or three times the norm. Truly divine beings have much, much more. Considering Osiris and Hermes, I would say a divine being would have six times the norm, at least. As a fertility spirit, Kong must have, not the mere two feet that a biological twenty-four-foot gorilla would possess, but amund twelve feet.”
“That fits with the anthropological books I’ve read,” I agreed. “The primitive theory is, the greater the Willy, the greater the divinity indwelling.”
We paused to consider the patapsychological ramifications of our theorizing. Thunder rumbled closer to my castle and more dogs began howling in anxiety.
“You know, fellers,” Dobbs said, filling his Pipe again–I had begun to recognize the aroma of what he was smoking and understood why he always had the same contented grin–”I come from Texas, where we got ourselves almost as many Catholics as here in Ireland. There’s a big donnybrook going on in the Catholic church these days because some nuns have become Feminists and are demanding the fight to say Mass. The Pope absolutely refuses to consider it. He says you absolutely have to have a Willy to perform the sacrament.”
De Selby had been hunting in my bar for more Tullamore, and, finding none, opened a bottle of my Jameson. “Why, of course a priest must have a Willy in Catholic theology,” he said mildly. “The priest represents God, who has the biggest Willy of all–even bigger than Kong’s.”
“What was that?” I objected. “There was a quantum jump or something there. Run that by me again.”
“You said it yourself,” de Selby drawled. ” ‘The greater the Willy, the greater the divinity indwelling.’ Yahweh, the Jewish God who became the Christian God, always claimed to be bigger and better than any of the other Near Eastem gods who competed with him. He would have to be endowed with a schlong that would make Osiris or Dionysus, say, look almost impotent by comparison.”
“Just how big would it be?” I challenged. If de Selby and “Bob,” with only two bottles of malt in them, could deduce the size of King Kong’s dong, I was sure that with another bottle they could do the same for Yahweh.
“Well,” de Selby said, “Yahweh himself isn’t much bigger than Kong. He walks around Eden at twilight without smashing down the trees or causing any notable wreckage of the sort Godzilla would leave in his wake. He shows his backside to Moses and nobody in Greece or even Babylon sees that cosmic spectacle. I would. say he couldn’t be more than forty or fifty feet tall. In bio-logic, he should have about four to five feet. In mytho-logic, if he were any ordinary fertility god like Hermes or Finn, he would have six times that or around twenty-four to thirty feet. As the Lord of Lords and King of Kings, etc., he would double our expectations at least. He should have around fifty feet. In passion, he would be symmetrical, fifty feet high and fifty wide in the middle, sort of like a giant F with the top stroke missing.”
“I begin to feel the same sympathy for the Virgin Mary that I experienced earlier for Fay Wray,” I said, finishing off my own shot of Jameson. But then another thought struck me. “Yahweh may have been about that siz-probably was that size, I think-back in Biblical times. The scriptures are full of lots of other references that show him about the height of Finn Mac Cool or Zeus, say. But he has grown during the scientific epoch. Every new advance in astronomy has necessitated that the whole Judeo-Christian tradition has had to make him bigger and uh er more gaseous, as it were. By the time of Newton, he had to be at least millions of miles in circumference to create the known universe. Since we started finding other galaxies in the 1920s, he has swollen to billions and billions of light-year-at least.”
“Yes,” said “Bob” thoughtfully. “To be consistent with known cosmology, theJudeo-Christian God would have to bebodacious, to say the least of it. And the size of his Willy-gol dang, the mind spins at the thought.”
“And yet if we accept Christianity in any sense, even as metaphor like Mr. T. S. Eliot,” de Selby muttered pensively, “the metaphor demands such a whang for its divinity. Billions of zillions of parsecs from foreskin to base. The only way out of that logic is the Feminist path. Neuter the divinity. He has no dong at all. He isn’t a he anymore. A cosmic eunuch.”
“Well, there’s also the Radical Feminist-path,” I suggested. “He’s a she.”
“Lawdy, lawdy,” said “Bob” dazedly, quickly gulping some more Jameson. “Now we
have to try to visualize a vagina quadrillions of parsecs deep.”11
It was at this point, alas, that the whiskey began to go to my head and I nodded off in my chair. De Selby and “Bob” politely did not try to arouse me, reasoning that I needed the rest, and went ahead helping themselves to my rare cognacs, now that the Jameson was exhausted. In that hypnopompic state midway between drunkenness and coma, I was half aware, or dreamed I was half aware, of the continuing conversation.
Somehow de Selby and “Bob” wandered from the high theological contemplation of divine dongs back to the King himself, and were united in condemning the cheap remakes produced by some Japanese studios and the abominable caricatures of De Laurentiis. Still: They thought it was time for a “sincere” remake, and soon had sketched out a film which I, in my reverie, could see as clearly as if they had already shot it.
Ann Darrow, this time, would be played by Marilyn Chambers, on the pounds that Behind the Green Door was, psychoanalytically considered, already a part of the Kong mythos. Like Fay Wray in the original, Marilyn in Green Door is kidnapped and ordered as a mate to a divinely endowed Fertility Spirit. “Bob” and de Selby agreed heartily that the black superstud in Door, with his gargantuan tool (and the “savage” bone in his nose) represented the same primitive generative force as Kong. “Pornography,” I heard “Bob” say profoundly, “merely makes explicit what is implicit in folk art like Kong.”
In the new Kong, Marilyn Chambers and a porno producer, played by Al Pacino, sail to Skull Island to make the ultimate wet-shot epic. Kong appears with his five-foot whang clearly visible in every shot. “No fig leaves!” said “Bob” emphatically. The giant dinosaurs and other monsters run amok, as in the original, creating ample mayhem for the S-M crowd, and Marilyn is rescued by a different crew member each time Kong or one of these reptiles menaces her; she expresses her gratitude in traditional Chambers fashion, for the voyeur majority.
At the climax, when Kong is running wild in New York, looking for his mate, Marilyn, his giant tool attracts the horrified notice of Andrea Dworkin, playing herself. She quickly rounds up a crew of five hundred fat ladies from circuses and they overrun and bring down the Big Fellow without any help from airplanes. They then emasculate him in gory detail, on wide screen with Technicolor.
The organ is then weighed down with a lead block and thrown in the East River so it will never rise again. While Dworkin leads a horde of Radical Feminists in a victory celebration, the film cuts to a conference room at a university and switches to documentary style. Various leading spokesentities12 for the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal–e.g., Carl Sagan, Martin Gardner, James Randi and Professor von Hanfkopf–are then given equal time to persuade the audience that gorillas never grow to twenty-four feet tall and that the film just shown has been fantasy and therefore nefarious. Von Hanfkopf gets the microphone first, but his talk soon degenerates into incoherentravings about cocaine abuse in Hollywood, CIA plots, the “Vatican-Mafia axis,” etc., and he is gently persuaded to relinquish the podium. Randi begins denouncing everybody who disagrees with him about anything, saying they are all frauds, felons and child abusers. Martin Gardner gets the microphone away from him and argues that all the wreckage in midtown Manhattan does not prove the existence of giant apes and can be “more economically and scientifically explained” by positing the crash of a giant meteor. Dr. Sagan then approaches the podium and urges everybody to beware of wild and fanciful ideas. He rambles off into lyrical exposition about billions and billions of galaxies with billions and billions of stars, and is about to proceed further in that vein when suddenly a huge black hand crashes through the floor and grabs him by the testicles.
At that point, I drifted into deeper sleep. In a while, however, I was either startled awake or fell into the worst nightmare of my life–I have never been sure which–but it seemed to me that de Selby had returned to his original subject, the dimensions of divine dongs, and was arguing that Catholicism remains the last survivor of the ithyphallic cults of the ancient Mediterranean. Not only must one have a Willy to be a priest, he was saying, but the Pope continues to insist on that because the inner order within the church–I think he meant the Knights of Malta–still holds the antediluvian credo about the biggest Willy containing the greatest Animal Magnetism, or magic, or indwelling divinity, or something like that. He proposed a totally new, and shocking, theory as to how Popes are selected by the College of Cardinals and why these proceedings are always hidden from the public behind locked doors and no details are ever revealed. Evidently, he was seriously suggesting that, just as it requires a Willy to turn a piece of bread into the body of a dead Jew, it requires the biggest Willy on the planet to anoint others and pass on the power to perform this astounding alchemical transformation.
While I was grappling with this thought, imagining the secret conclaves of the Curia looking like the casting sessions for male lead in a porn epic, and wondering why Kong had not been appointed at least an Honorary Pope, Rancid the butler suddenly burst into the room, carrying a Thompson submachine gun.
“This has gone far enough!” he shouted, glassy-eyed and foaming a bit.
“Come, come, old man–” I began gently, as one must begin with drunks.
“Don’t ‘old man’ me, you Unitarian pervert,” he screamed hysterically. The tommy gun, aimed loosely at all of us before, now pointed directly at my gut. “I am no damned butler. I am Cardinal Luigi Mozzarella, of the Holy Office for the Doctrine of the Faith, and Grand Master of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta.”
There was a stifled silence, as we all took this in.
“We don’t have the Maltese Falcon, honestly” said “Bob” weakly.
“Fuck that damned bird,” Cardinal Mozzarella shouted. “We’ve wasted eight hundred years looking for it, and eight hundred years is more than enough on a losing project. I am one of the thirty-two agents assigned to monitor the heresiarch, de Selby, and it is just as we feared. You have guessed the inner secrets of our Holy Order and you will have to be eliminated. All of you.”
He raised the tommy gun and I felt that sinking sensation which Chandler, I believe, has defined as the acute consciousness that one is not bullet-proof.
“All right, Luigi, drop the gun!”
All of us spun about to stare at the door, where Adam, the wand o’d gardener, stood, no longer wand or old. He had removed his white wig and abandoned his crouched posture. He was a young and dangerous man, and he carried an automatic rifle.
Cardinal Mozzarella dropped his tommy gun, stunned. De Selby darted forward and picked it up.
“Permit me to introduce myself,” said the stranger who had once been my gardener. “I am Adam Weishaupt IX, primus illuminatus, and Grand Master of the Ordo Templi Orientus, the Scotch Rite, the York Rite, the Egyptian Rite and the Rite of Memphis and Mizraim. In shod,” he summed up, “I control every Freemasonic conspiracy on the planet. We have been watching and protecting you for a long time, Professor de Selby, since we knew the Knights of Malta would eventually attempt to take your life.”
De Selby carefully placed the tommy gun on the writing desk, in the corner. I absently noticed that “Bob” wandered off in that direction and sat casually on the edge of the desk, relighting his Pipe. Just then the F
rench windows smashed open and the maids, Immaculata and Concepcion, burst into the room, each carrying a bazooka. “Put down that rifle, Illuminati dog,” cried Immaculata. “We are taking charge here.”
“Who the hell are you?” Cardinal Mozzarella gasped, evidently unable to believe there could be so many conspiracies afoot in one Gothic castle.
“We are the High Priestesses of the Paratheo-Anametamystikhood of Eris Esoteric, or POEE,” Concepcion said. (POEE was pronounced “poo-ey,” at least in her dialect.)
“Eris?” cried the primus illuminatus.
“Eris, goddess of chaos, discord, confusion, bureaucracy and international relations,” Immaculata explained. “Our slogan is ‘Disobedience was Woman’s original virtue.’ Too long has the world been run by male conspiracies. We are the first all-female conspiracy.”
“Heresy,” hissed the cardinal venomously.
“The inevitable yin balance to our yang energies,” the Illuminatus muttered thoughtfully.
“Are you going to kill us?” I asked, being practical about the situation.
“No, of course not,” Immaculata said. “Chaos is our Lady’s natural modktier. We came here to stop you from killing one another. We want you all alive, so you can go on spreading disputation and confusion and Chaos will always steadily increase. Hail Eris. All hail Discordia.”
“So,” Concepcion said, “we must ask all of you to move the guns–with your feet please–to the center of the room. And then you must leave by separate doors. Go forth in peace,” she added piously, “and continue to preach false doctrines.”
“Just a minute, ladies,” said de Selby. “I have a brief statement to make. Professor de Selby died in his sleep, peacefully, over ten years ago. I have been impersonating him ever since. I am a time traveler, in your terms. I was originally bom in Damascus over a thousand years ago. My name was Abdul Alhazred and I was the first to learn the art of positronic reincarnation. In lay terms, when one brain wears out with age, I simply move my quantum energy into another brain. I took over de Selby as he was dying and simply continued the Great Work to which the Order of the Hashishim have been dedicated for a millennium–the lletum of the Great Old Ones, or GOO, as we call them.”
“Goo?” Immaculata cried, stunned.
“Well, they are kind of slimy,” Abdul admitted, “but they are stronger than your Eris, or the other gang’s Yahweh, or any of these recent parvenu gods. And now that I have the leaders of all the other and hence lesser cults assembled in one place, I shall summon Great Cthulhu to eat your souls.” And he began chanting in a nameless Elder Tongue:
“Ia, Shub-Niggurath! Cthulhu fthagn! Yog Sothoth neblod zin! Ia! Io! Nov shmoz ka pop! Ph’nglui mgIw’nafld nagcopaleen Baile atha Cliath wgah’nagl fthagn!”
As he chanted this blasphemous and nameless invocation, the mad Arab began to metamorphose before our very eyes, growing, swelling, becoming like unto a huge bowl of green yogurt, then changing into a jellyfish with a million bloodshot ayes, then becoming a pit bull with AIDS, then a Republican attorney general, a werewolf, every fearsome creature of nightmare and horror imaginable by a hashish-crazed brain, for all these horrific visions were, I now realized, individual aspects of the multiple monstrosity that was Cthulhu, the Interstellar Banker, source of all evil and conspiracy, inventor of punk rock, Eater of Souls, the Thing in the center of the Pentagon!!!
And then, “Bob,” so drunk that he had lost track of who was in charge tried to kick the tommy gun into the center of the room, as the Erisians had demanded, and the gun began to spray bullets in all directions. I dived for the window and rolled dizzily down the lawn, my brain temporarily unhinged by the terrible visions I had seen.
They tell me that neighbors found me wandering in the rain, gibbering incoherently. They called an ambulance. I have been in St. John of God’s Hospital for alcohol abusers for two weeks now. They think the terrible things I was muttering when brought here indicate too much Irish whiskey, and I am willing to let them think that. I dare not tell the good nuns here how Popes are actually chosen, or why it requires a Willy to perform the transubstantiation of molecules in the eucharist . . . or that in the last mind-numbing moment before “Bob” accidentally set off the tommy gun I saw the the face of Cthulhu, the master of this Death Universe, and recognized that it was my own … for now the positronic transformation is being accomplished again. Yes, Abdul Alhazred lives anew, for I am he, and I know now that I was wrong in my youth to believe that good was better than evil because it is generally nicer. Now I know, from one thousand years of memories of many lives, that evil is better than good because it always wins in the end. . . . Ia! Shrug-Yrsh’ldrs! Notary sojac! Sinn fein amhain!

Endnotes
1 De Selby was the most controversial Irish philosopher of the later twentieth century. For biographical details, see O’Brien, Dalkey Archive, Picador Books, London,’ l976, and/or Wilson, The Widow’s Son , Bluejay Press, New York, 19S5. Highlights of the de Selby furor will be found in Conneghen, The de Selby Codex and Its Critics, Royal Sir Myles na gCopaleen Anthropological Society Preas, Dalkey, 1937; Flahive, Teratological Evolution , Royal Sir Myles na gCopaleen Biochemical Institute Press, Dalkey, 1972; Vinkenoog, De Selby: De onbekende filosoof , De Kosmos, Amsterdma, 1951; La Foumier, De Selby: l’Enigme de l’Occident, University of Paris, 1933; Han Tui Po, De Selby Te Ching , University of Beijing, 197S; La Toumier (not to be confused with La Foumier), De Selby: Homme ou Dieu? , Editions J’ai Lu, Paris, 1904; von Hanfkopf, De Selbyismus und Dummheit (6 vols.), University of Heidelberg, 1942-52; La Puta, La Estupidez de Hanjkopf , University of Madrid, 1975; Turn-und-Taxis, Ist de Selby eine Drage oder haben wir sie nur falsch verstanden? , Sphinx Verlag, Basel, 1922; O’Broichnan, A Chara, na caith tabac , Royal Sir Myles na gcopaleen Zoological Institute Press, Dalkey, 1992.
2 The Knights of Malta–or, more properly, the Sovereign Military Order of Malta (abbreviated SMOM)–is the eight-hundred-year-old Vatican “secret police” or “dirty tricks bureau.” According to Covert Action Information Bulletin #25, Winter 1986, notable recent members of SMOM have included Dr. Otto von Hapsburg (a prime organizer of the infamous “Bilderbergers”), Franz von Papen (the man who persuaded President von Hindenburg to resign and appoint Hitler chancellor of Germany), William Casey (the CIA chief who died mysteriously during the Iran-Contra hearings), Major General Reinhard Gehlen (vice supra), General Alexander Haig, William F. Buckley, Jr., Clare Boothe Luce, and the three ringleaders of the P2 conspiracy in Italy–Roberto Calvi, Michele Sindona and Licio Gelli. Bai gent, Lincoln and Leigh in The Messianic Legacy (Henry Holt, New York, 19S7) have added to the list of BMOM members Alexandre de Marenches, former chief of Wench intelligence, and claim mysterious links between SMOM and the Priory of Sion. Gordon Thomas and Max Wittman in The Year of Armaggedon (Corgi, London, 1984) claim that BMOM members act as couriers between the Vatican and the CIA. Most scholars dissent vehemently from von Hanfkopfs ill-documented charge that de Selby, Flahive, La Toumier and the shadowy La Fournier are all members of SMOM.
3 The Illuminati, founded in Bavaria in 1776, was (or is) a secret society within a 8ecret society, since all members were first Freemasons before being invited into the Illuminati itself. See Nestawebster, World Revolution, Christian Back Club of America, Hawthorne, California, n.d.; “Inquire Within,” The Trail of the Serpent, Christian Book Club of America, Hawthome, California, n.d. ; and Wilson, Cosmic Trigger, Falcon Backs, Santa Monim, 1987. The Illuminati technique of forming a secret society within another secret society was later imitated by the Molly Maguires, an Irish revolutionary group within the Ancient Order of Hibernians, and the P2 conspiracy which recruited within the Grand Orient Lodge of Egyptian Freemasonry in Italy–although secretly managed, as noted above, by three members of the Vatican secret service, SMOM. Professor Flahive was under great personal stress when he began his campaign to convince the learned community that von Hanfkopf was actually the ringleader of an Illuminati conspiracy against de Selby.
4 According to Paoli (Les Dessous d’une ambition politique, Hurhaus Verlag, Basel, 1973), the Priory of Sion is a serious political conspiracy of aristocratic Wench Freemasons who intend to restore monarchy in France. According to de Sede (La Race fabuleuse, Editions J’ai Lu, Paris, 1973), the Priory is descended from superhumans born of matings between ancient Hebrews and extraterrestrials from Sirius. According to Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln (Holy Blood, Holy Grail, Delacorte, 1982), the Priory is descended from the royal line of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. According to Michael Lame (Jules Verne, initiate et initiateur, Editions J’ai Lu, Paris, 1985), the Priory is a front for the Illuminati and Veme’s “science fiction” novels are subtle Illuminati recruiting manuals. De Selby claims (Golden Hours, Royal Sir Myles na gcopaleen Philosophical Society Press, Dalkey, 1957) that the IlluminatilPriory axis is an attempt to spread electric light everywhere, thereby banishing the “teratclogical molecules” which move backwards in time and generate Chaos, but this must be considered one of the more imaginative flights of the Dalkey sage.
5 The Campus Crusade for Cthulhu has been alleged to be responsible for the recent crop of child murders and cattle mutilations elsewhere attributed to Satanists; see Rev. Jedidiah Blather, The Cthulhu Cult, Interstellar Bankers and Punk Rock, True Christian Book Club of America, Tulsa, 1987. Although few credit this wild charge, the CCC is definitely responsible for the bumper stickers that say things like IT FOUND ME, ABDUL ALHAZRED WAS NOT MAD, YOG SOTHOTH NEBLOD ZIN, etc. Von Hanfkopes attempts to link La Puta to the CCC are best described as tenuous and (as Ferguson said) “clutching at straws.” It was after Professor Ferguson uttered these dews on the BBC that the police of his hometown, Loch Pockah, received letters claiming he, Ferguson, was the Yorkshire Ripper. These letters were in clumsy English (“rather like that of the Katzenjammer Kids,” according to Inspector MacAndrew, who handled the investigation) and had Heidelberg postmarks.
6 The de Selby controversy originally empted into political mania after Professor von Hanfkopf charged (see his Werke, vol. XXIII, pp. 506-36ff.) that some of the moneys embezzled from Banco Ambrosiano of Milan in the early 1980s (by the bank’s president, Roberto Calvi, and his associates in the P2 conspiracy) had been “laundered” through a Dublin bank account which de Selby allegedly used to finance IRA terrorism in Northem Ireland. Although this charge was unsubstantiated, Professor Flahive rebutted it at great length (Proceodings of the Royal Sir Myles na gCopaleen Institule of Internotionai Relations, vol. LVI, pp. 309-417) and it was after this that the Special Branch of the Gardld (the police of the Republic of Ireland) began receiving letters with a Heidelberg postmark charging (in broken English) that Flahive himself was involved in running guns for the IRA. This was immediately after the unfortunate and much-debated incident involving Professor Flahive and the fourteen-year-old Girl Scout from Sallynoggin, and the distressed savant, a devout Catholic and conservative, began making wild charges about “intemational plots” and “frameups” and, sadly, eventually degenerated to the same tactics as von Hanfkopf, claiming that the Heidelberg philosopher was formerly associated with the Gehlen apparat and the CIA’s “Russian” branch-the group, under Magor General Reinhard Gehlen, Knight of Malta and former head of army intelligence for Hitler, which conducts espionage within the Soviet Union itself of course, the crude (and ineffective) letter bomb sent to Professor Flahive at this point, although postmarked Alexandria, Virginia, could have been sent by anybody (and one assumes the CIA are at least clever enough not to mail such devices from a city

universally known to be their international headquarters); but after Roberto Calvi, President of Banco Ambrosiano, was found hanging from Blackfriars Bridge in London that same week, and his secretary, Ms. Graziella, fell or was pushed from a window of the Milan office of that bank, sheer paranoia descended upon all those involved in the de Selby feud or even in the abstract mathematical arguments about de Selby’s “plenuminary time” and teratclogical molecules.” As La Puta has incisively remarked, “The entire de Selby debate is degenerating into the worst academic schelmozzle since the Bacon-Shakespeare lunacy.”
7 “PLA” is Dublin slang for Portlaois Lunatic Asylum, the place which many of de Selby’s critics claimed would be his ultimatedestination. As La Foumier wrote (De Selby: l’Enigme de la Occident, p. 23), “While much about the sage of Dalkey remains in dispute, none have denied that he held a greater number of totally original ideas than any philosopher in history not known to havebeen kept in a padded cell.” Von Hanfkopfs claim that Le Fournier was a mask, a nonentity, a fiction, a stalking horse behind which de Selby wrote commentaries on himaelf, in French no less, has not been conclusively verified, and La Puta claims to haverefuted it entirely in his La Estupidez, op. cit. It was after this work was published that the Spanish police began receiving letters, with a Heidelberg postmark, alleging in bad Spanish that La Puta was the chief opium smuggler in Madrid and a KGB agent. Professor Hamburger’s attempts to link La Puta to the Illuminati (Proceedings of the London Musicological Society, vol. XXIII, pp. 7-133) do, however, appear to be well documented and possess some merit, although Hamburger’s argument that it was La Puta, not de Selby, who laundered the cocaine money for the P2 conspiracy is far from convincing. Aa Penny Lemoux documents in her In Banks We Trust (Anchor Press/Doubleday, Garden City, New York, 1984), most of the cocaine money went through the World Finance Corporation in Miami and the Cisalpine Overseas Bank in the Bahamas, which was owned by the deceased Robert Calvi and Archbishop Marcinkus. The argument of Yallop (In God’s Name, Bantam, New York, 1984) that Calvi and Marcinkus collaborated in the murder of Pope John Paul I is, of course, highly speculative.
8 As du Garbandier has written (De Selby et l’or de Rennes, p. 17) “Le supr?me chorine qu’on trouve ˆ lire une page de de Selby est qu’elle vans conduit inexorablement ˆ l’heureuse certitude que des sots De sent pad les plus grands.” Van Hanfkopfs charge (Der Spiegel, 2/2/1982) that de Garbandier was a member of the shadowy and sinister Priory of Sian seems, for once, adequately documented and in comunction with the links established between the Priory of Sian in Paris and the Italian P2 conspiracy (see Baigent, Lincoln, and Leigh, The Messianic Legacy, op. cit., passim) lends at least a tinge of near credibility ta the alleged P2 account at the Bank of Ireland in de Selby’s naale, although Ferguaon’s attempts (Armageddon, Ed Smith University Press, Biloxi, Mississippi, 1983) ta link de Selby to the cocaine laundering of Roberto Calvi, Michele Sindona and Archbishop Paul Marcinkus still renwins dubious, Kertloaey’s thesis of the double de Selbys and the linkage from the Knights of Malta ta the Campus Cmsade for Cthulhu (The Second De Selby, Thelema Books, Dallas, 1983) is patently absurd. If Kerflooey had not been present in Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963, and had not died in a hit-and-mn auto accident the week his bock was published, this nonsense would never have been taken seriously by anyone.
9 De Selby’s lifelong enthusiasm for Alfred Jarry and Pataphysics had led him to name his own System “patapsYchology.” (Like all Irish miters, de Selby was convinced he had to cream a System, and the more inscrutable the System was to the non-CÎltic reader, the better.) Due to a printer’s error parapsychology was misspelled as parapsychology in the first edition of his Teratologica Ontologicum, and La Puta has always claimed that it was this misreading that motivated the vehement, venomous and vitriolic polemics von Hanfkopf was to write, denouncing first de Selby himself and then all quantum physicists who claimed to find value in de selby’s concept of plenumary time. (Von Hanfkopf was the organizer of the SS, or Scientific Skeptics, the German branch of CSICOP, the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of claims of the Paranormal.) Parapsychology is defined by de Selby as the study of “unique, statistically improbable, nondeterministic mental processes,” or, more elegantly, “neurological negative entropy.”
10 This myth continues to live, largely due to the publicity campaign of the John Dillinger Died for You Society, headquartered in Austin, Texas, and led by the shadowy Dr. Horace Naismith, who claims to be the illegitimate son of Mr. Dillinger. Although Kerflooey, op. cit., attempts to link the John Dillingsr Died for You Society to the ill-reputed Campus Crusade for Cthulhu and the even more infamous Parathec-Anametamystikhood of Eris Esoteric (POEE), his evidence is as unconvincing as hid “two de Selby’ and “three Oswald” theories. See Malaclyuse, Kerflooey Is Koput, Discordian Press, San Francisco, 1987. It is sad to report that when Malaclyuse invited Kerflooey to San Francisco for what he called “a serious, adult discussion” of their differences, Professor Kerflooey arrived armed, as the subsequent police report showed, with three revolvers, two pistols, five semiautomatic rifles, several vials of poison, two dirks, five swords, a meat cleaver, a flamethrower, a bazooka, several pounds of plastique explosive and 20 grams of gelignite. As Flahive said after the subsequent inquest, “Simple good taste and elementary decency should set certain limits on the integrity of even the most vigorous academic debate.”
11 I have often thought, later, that it was this conversation which inspired de Selby’s most controversial essay, “Can Goddess Create a Stone So Heavy That She Herself Cannot Lift It?,” which he optimistically submitted to several Radical Feminist journals in San Francisco. It was after this that WITCH (the Women’s Intemational Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell) began picketing de Selby’s home in Dalkey. It is unfortunate that Flahive, in his passion to defend de Selby against all detractors, attempted to prove the WITCHes were a “front” for the Knights of Malta. If Flahive had not been himself a former CIA agent and coincidentally present, like Kerfooey, in Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963, not even the wild-eyed Hamburger would have claimed evidence of foul play in FIahive’s subsequent tragic death in a hunting accident with Professor La Puta.
12 I am deliberately avoiding the human chauvinism of spokespersons.

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Poetry From Morocco: Fatiha Morchid

Absence
Do not say “absence tastes like madness”

Close your eyes

Wherever you are

You will find me . . .

Immovable as the sea

Wandering about

In the ebb and flow

Never absent.

—
A gap
A gap

Deepening forever

Nobody fills

Nobody

It struggles

But fails

Lets drop

A tear

—
For my palms
When out of a nightmare

You come to me

To exchange

Your bed . . .

For my palms

I let my locks hang down

Like navy-blue curtains

Spread out the gloom of waiting

Like a Sufi carpet

Then like a gypsy wet-nurse

Sit in solemn submission . . .

Shaking fatigue off your feet

And clouds off your forehead

Telling the story

Of Sleeping Beauty

Hoping you lie

Forever in my palms.

—
Sailing
I and the sea here

Your breath

In a cell-phone

. . . carries me

beyond

a sail,

without astrolabe

and the horizon your eyes . . .

—
The white blouse
I conceal my pain

And grin

I hasten to the notebooks of days

Use rouge on my lips

Navy-blue Kohl on my eyelids

And dress in white.
I sit behind a desk

Listening to the pain of others
Who cares

For my pain!

—

Fatiha Morchid was born on March 14, 1958. She received her doctorate in medicine in 1985, and has specialised in pediatery since 1990. Unlike most Moroccan poets, who generally came to poetry from the academic study of literature, Fatiha Morchid came to poetry from science, which is perhaps why she seems free from a certain tendency to conform to academic poetic norms, or to indulge in obscurity and experimentation.
The impression one gets from reading the poetry of Fatiha Morchid is that of a Moroccan woman standing at the edge of a big ‘Borgesian’ mirror that not only duplicates reality in its minutiae, but creates and transforms it. One sets out on a journey from the edge of ordinary everyday reality, but slowly finds oneself turning to the world beyond – a world starting at home and extending into the so-called ‘unhomely’, which according to Hanna Arendt designates “everything that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light”. Such a world can be none other than a Moroccan woman’s world, an upside down world where the day starts at sunset, promising profound interior revelations that belie the apparent weakness in daily feminine resignation, and turn the latter into a challenging stoicism:
By sunset

Her day rises

It no longer matters

Who the person is

That will ride

Her horse
Ready is she

To die

Reading Morchid’s poetry is discovering the mysterious reservoir of power from which Moroccan women tap their strength to survive in a harsh, unfriendly reality. This is perhaps what gives Morchid’s poetry its sense of urgency – the speakers of her poems do not seem to have any time at all for the usual elitist preoccupations.
In addition to practising medicine, Fatiha Morchid researches and presents medical tv-programmes for the Moroccan channel 2M TV.

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Mandelbrot Animation – Fractal Music – Psilocybin

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__________________

Distant Pavilions

One of the prints from my show….

Raining like crazy here in Portland. The weather has turned and is it ever coming down. Off to work, I am ever running late.
Blessings,
Gwyllm

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On The Menu:

As If Translated By Babel Fish….

The Links

Koan: Life as a Pig

Dawn is Streaking Red: The poetry of Mike Hoffman

Koan: The Moon Cannot be Stolen

______________

As If Translated By Babel Fish….

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The Links:

Shifting Targets

Federal Approval To Travel WITHIN The US Soon???

Rights of Indigenous People

Giving the Devil His Due

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Koan: Life as a Pig
One day, a old master had a vision of his next life. He immediately called in his favorite disciple and begged a favor of him.
“Anything for you master.” the disciple replied.
“In my next life, I will come back as a pig. Soon after I die, our sow will give birth and I will be the fourth pig of the litter. You will recognize me by a mark on my brow. When that happens, please take a sharp knife and end my life quickly.
Within the year, the master passed away and the sow gave birth. The disciple sharpened his knife and found the small piglet. Suddenly the little pig screamed “Stop! Don’t kill me!”
The disciple dropped his knife in surprise and stared at the little pig. “When I was like you I didn’t know what a pig’s life would be like. It’s great. Just let me go.”
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Dawn is Streaking Red: The poetry of Mike Hoffman
I am pleased to share some poems from Mike Hoffman’s new book with you… ‘Dawn is Streaking Red’.
If you are interested in picking up a copy, they are $5.00 inclusive of shipping (US & Canada)..

You can contact Mike at: m_hoffman@fastmail.fm for your autographed copy!
Mike has worked on this book for awhile, and like him he kept it pretty quiet. I am pleased he has brought it forth and is sharing it with the world!

We Are Each Other (Meeting the Mother)
Gathering, in a safe cocoon

The little death, Mother of our Hearts

Weaves her way

Into every cell

Permeating and probing

It’s OK

To weep when you plant;

It’s your funeral.
Seeing to the molecular

Breathing beautifully, deeply

Trembling, minded sound

Wave upon waves

Magic melodies

Doing psychic surgery

Brimming, behind our eyes

Overflowing, into our Heart.
The source of knowledge

The magnificent elegance

Embodying principles

Of creativity and love

She is with you now,

And forever

As we carry, each other

Out into the world.

—
Beltane
Overworked emotions

Overworked bodies

The gloom and stress

Of overworked society

It’s time for some merrymaking

In the bushes.
Let’s move what we can move

And shake what we can shake

Be kind to ourselves

The veil between the worlds

Is thin now.
Pay attention; tune to the Heart

Magic is afoot

In service to something

Hospice worker or midwife

Healing one is healing all

In a holographic universe.
Approach the unknown

Be unafraid to look

At the unseen worlds

Of myths and fairies.

Jump the fire

And dwell in the flame

Rumpled

By these sacred encounters.
Renegade perception

The power of open-hearted action

Gathering herbs, gathering power

Vernal sincerity

Because it’s absurd.

—
Afterglow
Intelligence in the background

Nature is in control

Cool dampness, vibrating delight

Early morning tears.

Be careful what you ask for.
Not willing to play the game

Unconcerned in the daily world

Your skin fits just right

Going from strawman to spectral

Undifferentiated perception?

After all, what can we really see?
A crack in the membrane

Everything glows

Splitting with the inferior

With language, communication by gesture

A polarity reversal

The body doesn’t lie.
Marvels abound

In little things, under our noses

Step out sweetly

Let the bottom drop out

A peculiar affair

Worthy of its temporariness

‘Till we go home for good.

_____________
Koan: The Moon Cannot be Stolen
Ryokan, a Zen master, lived the simplest kind of life in a little hut at the foot of a mountain. One evening a thief visited the hut only to discover there was nothing to steal.
Kyokan returned and caught him. “You may have come a long way to visit me, ” he told the prowler, “and you should not return empty-handed. Please take my clothes as a gift.”
The thief was bewildered. He tool the clothes and slunk away.
Ryokan sat naked, watching the moon. “Poor fellow,” he mused, “I wish I could give him this beautiful moon.”
_____________

“O how wretched is that poor man that hangs on princes favors! There is betwixt that smile we would aspire to, that sweet aspect of princes, and their ruin, more pangs and fears than wars or women have, and when he falls, he falls like Lucifer, never to hope again.”

– William Shakespeare

Went to a wonderful party this weekend, at Ann & Andrews’ Clanstead over in NE Portland. Our dear mutual friend Irina is soon departing Portland, for greener pastures in beautiful Olympia Wa., where she has taken a job with the state. Ann and Andrew laid out a wonderful table, and it was a night of toasting Irina, talking, laughter and joy. We will all miss her!
I just finished seeing that the art show at the Clinton Corner Cafe was being set up in a marvelous fashion by Charlie the proprietor. He was very excited about the prints, and was practically dancing around the cafe arranging the art. Great place, sweet people, truly a haven in the great SE of Portland.
A sad note for the neighborhood: The Red and Black Cafe is gone, and there goes a bit of history over on Division. I enjoyed the R n B immensely when my friend Morgan was helping run it. It was the place that Rowan gave his first poetry reading, and there was always, always something cool going on there. It will be missed!
Mike Hoffman stopped by Sunday, and gifted us with a copy of his new poetry book: “Dawn is Streaking Red” Pattern’s of Perception, Emotion, and Language We will be featuring poetry from it tomorrow! Good going Mike!
So… stay tuned, Invisible College almost there, Art Show is happening… and we will preview 3 poems from Mikes’ new poetry book. It looks like a good week!
Bright Blessings,
Gwyllm
__________
On The Menu:

Luciferian Quotes

Westboro Baptist Does ‘Gaybar’

The Boreal Crown and The Downfall of Civilization

Frank O’Hara Poems…

Art: Depictions of Lucifer…
____________
Luciferian Quotes: or where old Lucy does not get his due….

(For Timbo over at The West Cork Writers, Anarchist, and Knitting Society…)

“Of all the inhabitants of the inferno, none but Lucifer knows that hell is hell, and the secret function of purgatory is to make of heaven an effective reality.”

-Arnold Bennett
“On a starred night Prince Lucifer uprose. / Tired of his dark dominion swung the fiend.”

– George Meredith
“Unhappy spirits that fell with Lucifer, / Conspired against our God with Lucifer, / And are for ever damned with Lucifer.”

– Christopher Marlowe
“The first sin in our universe was Lucifer’s self conceit.”

– Thomas Carlyle
“You might, from your appearance, be the wife of Lucifer. Nevertheless, you shall not get the better of me. I am an Englishwoman.”

– Charles Dickens

___________
Westboro Baptist Does ‘Gaybar’
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___________
The Boreal Crown and The Downfall of Civilization

-by Anonymous

In 1808 the illuminated theorist and “Utopian Socialist” Charles Fourier launched the first fully realized and consciously revolutionary attack on CIVILIZATION by publishing his Theory of the Four Movements in France. No one noticed — any more than anyone noticed the books of William Blake, the only thinker of the era comparable to Fourier. In this brief text we cannot attempt a full report of Fourier´s brilliant utopian system of society, which he called HARMONY. But we could at least recall his programme involved the reorganization of human life into large groups, called Phalanxes, arranged in “Series” according to “Attraction” — that is, according to shared “Passions”. For Fourier, Passion was the sole possible organizing principe for utopian life. In brief: if everyone were free always to do exactly what they desire, all reason for social discord would vanish. Scarcity of any good — material, spiritual, erotic — can only be artificially imposed on society by CIVILIZATION, For Nature is naturally “generous”. Marriage, poverty, work, morality, loneliness, alienation, violence, boredom — these civilized miseries constitute the perverse results of a system which benefits a few at the expense of the health of Earth herself.
Fourier believed not only that humans are the desiring subjects of a desirable object (i.e., Terrestial Harmony), but also that the Earth and all other celestial bodies (planets, stars, etc.) are also living, sentient, desiring beings. The “force of attraction” that holds the universe(s) together can only be described as Passion, Erotic desire organizes not only the microcosm of human society but also the macrocosm (e.g., our solar system) in mandala of Harmony — the “Lineaments of gratified desire” as Blake would say.
Thus everything, quite literally everything, is moved solely by erotic attraction. In Harmony we shall work only at that which satisfies a Passion — and we shall be free to choose “Attractive Labor” — and since humans are inherently passionate beings, Harmonian economics will replace the illusion of scarcity with the reality of super-abundance. Everyone will be “rich. Everyone will eat like a 18th century french gourmet (but the food will be healthy because it will be prepared according to the Harmonian science of Gastrosophy) — and everyone will enjoy at least “utopian minimum” of erotic pleasure. This immense intensification of animal/animate life will soon produce beneficial mutations even of the human body: — we shall need only a few hours of sleep per night, we shall grow taller and more beautiful, and within a few generations we shall each have a tail with an extra “hand” at the tip, and an extra eye in the palm of the hand . Moreover the climate will change and the seas will turn something like lemonade. Most of these changes will occur not through evolution and its endless eons, but almost immediately, spontaneously, virtually overnight — as soon as we abandon CIVILIZATION and institute HARMONY in its stead.
One reason why these changes will occur so rapidly can be explained by the fact that Civilization has literally knocked Earth out of its true position in the cosmos. normally, since stars and planets are sexual beings, they enjoy sexual intercourse. Their sex organs — so to speak — consist of great cosmic rays (which Fourier calls “aromal rays”); celestial bodies project these rays at one another and thereby experience the bliss of fertilizing potency of erotic contact. In former times Earth also possessed an aromal ray and enjoyed its benefits — which manifested in the peace and plenty, gender harmony and sexual freedom of the hunting/gathering (or gardening) economy of the Old Stone Age. But Civilization disrupted the aromal ray. Earth lost its orgasmic potential. As Wilhelm Reich would put it, Earth was cut off from the cosmic source of orgone energy; Civilization equals sexual repression and erotic scarcity.
Now clearly, if human society were to overcome the malign local effect of civilization and institute the Harmonial Era, our planet would at once recover its cosmic sexuality and its aromal ray. Immediately Earth would bathed again the perfume or illumination or jizm of the stars. Revivifying effects would begin to appear almost at once, and the initial eforts of the first Harmonians would be rewarded a thousand-fold through the vast new reservoirs or cosmic energy now available via Earth aromal ray.
in Theory of the Four Movements Fourier also revealed that Earth´s aromal ray — or rather its shattered fragments and dispersed remnants — can still be seen in the polar aurorae. the Northern and the Southern Lights (Aurora Borealis and Australis) resemble torn curtains of light. No Wonder! At one time they constituted coherent rays of brilliant color abd scebt which penetrated the yoni of the aether like an infinite lingam, and served as the pathway and vaginal gate for the infusion of subtle illumination-juices from everywhere in the multiverse. [ Incidentelly, this theory could be used to suggest that UFO´s are not extraterrestrial but consist in fact of local manifestations of “deadly orgone”, just as Reich feared]
Now it has occured to us that if the downfall of Civilization and the establishment of Harmony would result in the restauration of the “Boreal Crown” (as Fourier called it) to full coherence, then perhaps the opposite might also prove true. THE RESTAURATION OF THE BOREAL CROWN MIGHT RESULT IN THE DOWNFALL OF CIVILIZATION AND THE TRIUMPH OF HARMONY.
We believe it´s worth trying . But the big question facing us is — obviously — how? How does one go about repairing the Aurora Borealis?! If we knew the answer to the question we´d simply go and do it. The purpose of this text is to share our findings so far and to propose a framework for future research and action. We are convinced that this project will necesserly involve a certain amount of coordinated action by a great many people. We envision participation at many levels. Moreover, we have no intention of acting as the center of this participation. We prefer to remain anonymous, and it is possible that our specific actions will be carried out more-or-less clandestinely. We will publish no address; so if you want to share ideas with us please send texts to the publication in which this communique appears – or else find out who we are by word of mouth and contact us directly.
So far, we have arrived at the following understanding. The popular aurorae are connected in some way with the with the magnetic poles rather than the geographic poles. The North Magnetic Pole is currently the more accessible of the two, since it is currently moving very slowly across northern Canada. As of this writing it is near Barthurst Island. The latitude of peak auroral activity is actually described by an oval ring whos center is a few degrees off the magnetic pole in the direction of midnight. [See maps -Ed.]. The lights glow most intensely during magnetic storms, caused by an increase in the solar wind interacting with Earth´s magnetic field. At such times the auroral oval grows both southwards and toward the pole. The greatest auroral activity occurs at the peaks of the eleven-year sun-spot cycle, one of which, unfortunately, has just passed in the last year or two. It should be possible, nonetheless, to determine certain times and spaces at which our chance of acting on the Boreal Crown would be optimal. For example, if we determined that our action should take place at the magnetic place, we would calculate a time when weather conditions and geomagnetic activity would coincide to offer a maximal “window of opportunity”. If we decided that o
ur actions should occur within the auroral oval, then a different set of space/time parameters would come into play.
Besides the questions of time and place we also face the question of effective action. At present we believe that we should consider the probable necessity of installing one or more “aromal devices” at one or more key points connected with the auroral/magnetic activity. These aromal devices should be considered “machines” for the repair and restoration of the Boreal Crown. At present we remain uncertain about the design of such devices; but we intend to build at least one, and to install it at the chosen time and place. We hope that other groups and individuals will work on their own theories and also produce their own devices. Then, when a time and place have been determined, we will make this information publicly known. We will proceed to carry out an expedition, let´s say, to the Magnetic North Pole, timed to arrive at a certain day or period of days. We hope that others will launch their own simultaneous expeditions and that we will all rendezvous at the appointed moment and location. There and then we will carry out all our planned installation, actions, rituals, etc., together, inthe context of FESTIVAL.
Obviously a certain element of psychic technology enters into this project — and it is precisly on this psychic and “astral” level that many wish to participate in the action. Energy can be added to the activities of the Arctic expeditions (and to the acual installations or aromal devices) by the though projections and sympathetic actions of supporters and well-wishers all over the globe. We consider the possibility of a GENERAL STRIKE on the day of the festival, as the vital component of the operation. Everyone who cannot be with us at the installation of the site can carry out some symbolic and/or material action against Civilization, against Work, against oppression, boredom and alienation. This might consist of nothing more than wearing a symbol of the Festival (button, badge, flower, color, scent, etc.). Some participiants might simply wish to take a day off work and loll around, thinking about the Northern Lights. Group might want to organize actual strikes or demonstrations against miseries of Civilization, and in favor for Attractive Labor or the Utopian Minimum. Artists and creative groups might errect sympathetic installations or perform supportive rituals, whereever they might happan to be at the appointed hour.
Our project at present calls for the further refinement of all these ideas, and for their wides at possible dissemination. These tasks are perhaps best carried out by many groups and individuáls simultaneously and more-or-less anonymously, so that the best ideas and images will have a chance to circulate by word of mouth and by various informal networks. In this way they will have a chance to take a life on their own and to circulate under their own power, so to speak, in a natural, organic manner. In order to succeed this Festival and General Strike needs to belong to everyone and anyone. Already this text is the product of a group — a group that believes that its ideas will sink or soar solely according to the degree of Attraction they radiate. The one central idea of the idea is the restoration of the Boreal Crown to its primordial coherence as Earth´s aromal ray; around this center the event must come into being spontaneously, like the mandala of a snowflake, like atrue holiday, like an uprising. The event therefore, must create itself.
We might, however, speculate in more detail about our vision of the aromal device or machine for repairing Aurora. Certain themes have already been touched on, and we expcet the full structure of the device to precipitate and crystallize around this or other related themes: Magnetism, the Sun, the Earth´s magneto tail, magnets (the first compass was amagnetized needle floated in water), “animal magnetism”, sexual attraction, sexual fluids, aromas, perfumes, colors, lights, the North, the Arctic, hunting, gardening, the Old Age, night, stars, te North Star, the Moon (measurement of time), clocks, gold, crystal, ice, rays, coherent light, curtains and ribbons of light, heraldic emblems (symbols of the events) such as flowers, colors, geometric shapes, hieroglyphs, banners, music, dance, ritual, arctic shamanism, the Millennium, the end of Civilization, restoration of Harmony, peace, brilliance, delicious food and drink, transformation, the esoteric, the clandestine, the hidden, mutation, orgy, the erotic manias, performance, opera, alchemy, the mythology and the folkloire of the Northern Lights, mental energy, the visualization of coherent light as aroma, energy from the stars, orgone, blue, mirrors, maps, invocations…….
Imagine a “machine” with such “moving parts”, miniaturized to the size of a small box, taken to the North Pole, installed — and activated. Imagine it as a focus for the concentrated desire of a world sickened by Civilization — work, oppression — a vast desire channeled into one image: the Boreal Crown in full glory — and one goal: the downfall of Civilization. In combination: a Festival of Light.

– Anonymous

_________

“How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations! / For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north: / I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High.”

_________
Frank O’Hara Poems…

1951

Alone at night

in the wet city
the country’s wit

is not memorable.
The wind has blown

all the trees down
but these anxieties

remain erect, being
the heart’s deliberate

chambers of hurt
and fear whether

from a green apartment
seeming diamonds or

from an airliner
seeming fields. It’s

not simple or tidy
though in rows of

rows and numbered;
the literal drifts

colorfully and
the hair is combed

with bridges, all
compromises leap

to stardom and lights.
If alone I am

able to love it,
the serious voices,

the panic of jobs,
it is sweet to me.

Far from burgeoning
verdure, the hard way

in this street.

—
The Day Lady Died

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday

three days after Bastille day, yes

it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine

because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton

at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner

and I don’t know the people who will feed me
I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun

and have a hamburger and a malted and buy

an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets

in Ghana are doing these days

I go on to the bank

and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)

doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life

and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine

for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do

think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or

Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres

of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine

after practically going to sleep with quandariness
and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE

Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and

then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue

and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and

casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton

of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it
and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of

leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT

while she whispered a song along the keyboard

to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

—
Homosexuality

So we are taking off our masks, are we, and keeping

our mouths shut? as if we’d been pierced by a glance!
The song of an old cow is not more full of judgment

than the vapors which escape one’s soul when one is sick;
so I pull the shadows around me like a puff

and crinkle my eyes as if at the most exquisite moment
of a very long opera, and then we are off!

without reproach and without hope that our delicate feet
will touch the earth again, let alone “very soon.”

It is the law of my own voice I shall investigate.
I start like ice, my finger to my ear, my ear

to my heart, that proud cur at the garbage can
in the rain. It’s wonderful to admire oneself

with complete candor, tallying up the merits of each
of the latrines. 14th Street is drunken and credulous,

53 rd tries to tremble but is too at rest. The good
love a park and the inept a railway station,

and there are the divine ones who drag themselves up
and down the lengthening shadow of an Abyssinian head

in the dust, trailing their long elegant heels of hot air
crying to confuse the brave “It’s a summer day,

and I want to be wanted more than anything else in the world.”

—
A Quiet Poem

When music is far enough away

the eyelid does not often move
and objects are still as lavender

without breath or distant rejoinder.
The cloud is then so subtly dragged

away by the silver flying machine
that the thought of it alone echoes

unbelievably; the sound of the motor falls
like a coin toward the ocean’s floor

and the eye does not flicker
as it does when in the loud sun a coin

rises and nicks the near air. Now,
slowly, the heart breathes to music

while the coins lie in wet yellow sand.

___________
“Lucifer, the Son of the Morning! Is it he who bears the Light, and with its splendors intolerable blinds feeble, sensual, or selfish Souls? Doubt it not!”