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(THE PASSAGE – Jean-Pierre Ugarte)

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—-

Welcome to Monday…

Spent a good part of yesterday at Sauvie Island, hanging out at Sturgeon Lake. Sophie chased frogs, wallowed in various unmentionables and generally had a blast. It was very quiet on the main, though it seems even that far out, you can still here a motor at any given time. Silence is a commodity in short supply. Some have never known it. Stillness would be the second part of the component…

Anyway, we all sat in the shade of a tree taking it all in. Reading, eating and just getting away from right angles. No telephone lines, buildings what have you.

Back Now, and have a good one.

Gwyllm

On The Menu:

The Links

Hiroshima

The Priest’s Ghost

Poetry: William Butler Yeats

The Art: Jean-Pierre Ugarte

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The Links:

Legalizing Marijuana – A New Republican Strategy?

Brazil Publishes Biodiversity Generic Name List

American Madrassas: Jesus Camp

Love-Sick Manatees Put on a Show in Fla.

Save Bear Butte…

———

Hiroshima… not for the faint hearted.

_____

(THE DOLMEN – Jean-Pierre Ugarte)

The Priest’s Ghost

“A SAD tale’s best for winter,” saith the epigraph; and it was by the winter’s hearth that I heard the following ghost-story, rendered interesting from the air of reverential belief with which It was delivered from the withered lips of an old woman.

Masses for the souls of the dead are among the most cherished items of the Roman Catholic peasant’s belief; and it was to prove how sacred a duty the mass for the “soul of the faithful departed” is considered before the eternal judgment-seat, that the tale was told, which I shall endeavour to repeat as nearly as my memory will serve, in the words of the original narrator. It was a certain eve of St. John, as well as I can remember, that the old dame gave as the date of the supernatural occurrence.

“Whin Mary O’Malley, a friend of my mother’s (God rest her sowl!) and it was herself tould me the story: Mary O’Malley was in the chapel hearin’ vespers an the eve o’ Saint John, whin, you see, whether it was that she was dbrowsy or tired afther the days work–for she was all day teddin’ the new-cut grass, for ’twas haymakin’ sayson–or whether it was ordhered and that it was all for the glory of God, and the repose of a throubled sowl, or how it was, it doesn’t become me to say, but howsomever, Mary fell asleep in the chapel, and sound enough she slep’, for never a wink she wakened antil every individhial craythur was gone, and the chapel doors was looked. Well, you may be sure, it’s poor Mary O’Malley was freken’d, and thrimbl’d till she thought she’d ha’ died on the spot, and sure, no wondher, considerin’ she was locked up in a chapel all alone, and in the dark, and no one near her.

Well, afther a time she recovered herself a little, and she thought there was no use in life in settin’ up a phillelew, sthrivin’ to make herself heerd, for she knew well no livin’ sowl was within call; and so, on a little considheration, whin she got over the first fright at being left alone that-a-way, good thoughts kem into her head to comfort her; and sure she knew she was in God’s own house, and that no bad sper’t daar come there. So, with that she knelt down agin, and repeated her credos and pather-and -aves, over and over, antil she felt quite sure in the purtection of hiv’n, and then, wrappin’ herself up in her cloak, she thought she might lie down and sthrive to sleep till mornin’, whin, ‘may the Lord keep us!’ piously ejaculated the old woman, crossing herself most devoutly, ‘all, of a suddint a light shined into the chapel as bright as the light of day, and with that poor Mary, lookin’ up, seen it shinin’ out of the door of the vesthry, and immediately out walked out of the vesthry a priest dhressed in black vestments, and goin’ slowly up to the althar, he. said: ‘Is there anyone here to answer this mass?’

Well, my poor dear Mary thought the life ‘id lave her, for she dhreaded the priest was not of this world, and she couldn’t say a word; and whin the priest ax’d three times was there no one there to answer the mass, and got no answer, he walked back agin into the vesthry, and in a minit all was dark agin; but before he wint, Mary thought he looked towards her, and she said she’d never forget the melancholy light of his eyes, and the look he gave her quite pitiful like, and she said she never heerd before nor since such a wondherful deep voice.

Well, sir, the poor craythur, the minit the sper’t was gone–for it was a sper’t, God be good to us!–that minit the craythur fainted dead away; and so I suppose it was with her from one faint into another, for she knew nothin’ more about anything antil she recovered and kem to herself in her mother’s cabin, afther being brought home from the chapel next mornin’ whin it was opened for mass, and she was found there.

I hear, thin, it was as good as a week before she could lave her bed, she was so overcome by the mortial terror she was in that blessed night, blessed as it was, bein’ the eve of a holy saint, and more by token, the manes of givin’ repose to a throubled sper’t; for you see, whin Mary tould what she had seen and heard to her clergy, his Riverence, undher God, was enlightened to see the maynin’ of it all; and the maynin’ was this, that he undherstood from hearin’ of the priest appearin’ in black vestments, that it was for to say mass for the dead that he kem there; and so he supposed that the priest durin’ his lifetime had forgot to say a mass for the dead that he was bound to say, and that his poor sowl couldn’t have rest antil that mass was said, and that he must walk antil the duty was done.

So Mary’s clergy said to her, that as the knowledge of this was made. through her, and as his Riverence said she was chosen, he ax’d her would she go and keep another vigil in the chapel, as his Riverence said–and thrue for him–for the repose of a sowl. So Mary, bein’ a stout girl, and always good, and relyin’ on doin’ what she thought was her duty in the eyes of God, said she’d watch another night, but hoped she wouldn’t be ax’d to stay long in the chapel alone. So the priest tould her ‘twould do if she was there a little store twelve o’clock at night; for you know, sir, that people never appears antil afther twelve, and from that till cock-crow. And so accordingly Mary wint on the night of the vigil, and before twelve down she knelt in the chapel, and began a-countin’ of her beads, and the craythur, she thought every minit was an hour antil she’d be relaysed.

Well, she wasn’t kep’ long; for soon the dazalin’ light burst from out of the vesthry door, and the same priest kem out that appeared afore, and in the same melancholy voice he ax’d, when he mounted the althar: ‘Is there anyone here to answer this mass?’

Well, poor Mary sthruv to spake, but the craythur thought her heart was up in her mouth, and not a word could she say, and agin the word was ax’d from the althar, and still she couldn’t say a word; but the sweat ran down her forehead as thick as the winther’s rain, and immediately she felt relieved, and the impression was taken aff her heart like, and so, whin for the third and last time the appearance said: ‘Is there no one here to answer this mass?’ poor Mary mutthered out ‘Yis’ as well as she could.

Oh, often I heerd her say the beautiful sight it was to see the lovely smile upon the face of the sper’t as he turned round and looked kindly upon her, saying these remarkable words: ‘It’s twenty years,’ says he, ‘ I have been ‘askin’ that question, and no one answered till this blessed night, and a blessin’ be on her that answered, and now my business on earth is finished,’ and with that he vanished before you could shut your eyes.

So never say, sir, It’s no good praying for the dead; for you see that even the sowl of a priest couldn’t have pace for forgettin’ so holy a thing as a mass for the sowl of the faithful departed.”

(Cavern – Jean-Pierre Ugarte)

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Poetry: William Butler Yeats

To An Isle In The Water

Shy one, shy one,

Shy one of my heart,

She moves in the firelight

pensively apart.

She carries in the dishes,

And lays them in a row.

To an isle in the water

With her would I go.

With catries in the candles,

And lights the curtained room,

Shy in the doorway

And shy in the gloom;

And shy as a rabbit,

Helpful and shy.

To an isle in the water

With her would I fly.

—

The Arrow

I thought of your beauty, and this arrow,

Made out of a wild thought, is in my marrow.

There’s no man may look upon her, no man,

As when newly grown to be a woman,

Tall and noble but with face and bosom

Delicate in colour as apple blossom.

This beauty’s kinder, yet for a reason

I could weep that the old is out of season.

—

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:

Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;

There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

—

Crazy Jane on God

That lover of a night

Came when he would,

Went in the dawning light

Whether I would or no;

Men come, men go;

All things remain in God.

Banners choke the sky;

Men-at-arms tread;

Armoured horses neigh

Where the great battle was

In the narrow pass:

All things remain in God.

Before their eyes a house

That from childhood stood

Uninhabited, ruinous,

Suddenly lit up

From door to top:

All things remain in God.

I had wild Jack for a lover;

Though like a road

That men pass over

My body makes no moan

But sings on:

All things remain in God.

(THE PRISONER – Jean-Pierre Ugarte)

Still working on the fund raising for the radio, we are getting closer with the help we have been receiving! Still a ways to go, if you can help out, that would be super!

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From Rumi: Ghazal 2133

wake up, wake up

this night is gone

wake up

abandon abandon

even your dear self

abandon

there is an idiot

in our market place

selling a precious soul

if you doubt my word

get up this moment

and head for the market now

don’t listen to trickery

don’t listen to the witches

don’t wash blood with blood

first turn yourself upside down

empty yourself like a cup of wine

then fill to the brim with the essence

a voice is descending

from the heavens

a healer is coming

if you desire healing

let yourself fall ill

let yourself fall ill

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Welcome to Sunday… Visited our Tom and Cheryl last night, it was very pleasant, we got to see friends that we haven’t seen for quite awhile, Darren & Donna and their son Gavin. Gavin and Rowan were friends when they were young(er), until we moved over to the Hawthorne District (The People’s Autonomous Region Of Hawthorne) Gavin is a drummer, a very good singer and an actor. It was nice to see the connection being made again. We had a great time, staying later than we planned originally but that was nice as well.

Heating up at this point, about to head out to Sauvie Island for some relief from right angles.

Stay tuned….

Gwyllm

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On The Menu:

Tim Buckley – Song To The Siren

Tom Moore and the Seal Woman

Poems – Ira Cohen

Art by Nicholas Kalmakoff

Tim Buckley – Song To The Siren

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Tom Moore and the Seal Woman

A PROPOS of the following tale, I may say: The intermarriage with and descent of men from beings not human touches upon one of the most interesting and important points in primitive belief. Totemism among savage races in our day, and descent from the gods in antiquity are the best examples of this belief; derived from it, in all probability but remotely, are family escutcheons with their animals and birds and the emblematic beasts and birds of nations, such as the Roman eagle, the British lion, the American eagle, the Russian bear. The Roman eagle and the wolf which suckled Romulus may have been totems, if not for the Romans, at least for some earlier people. The lion, eagle, and bear of England, America, and Russia are of course not totemic, though adopted in imitation of people who, if they had not totems, had as national emblems birds or beasts that at some previous period were real totems for some social body.

There is a tale in Scotland concerning people of the clan MacCodrum, who were seals in the daytime, but men and women at night. No man of the MacCodrums, it is said, would kill a seal. The MacCodrums are mentioned in Gaelic as “Clann Mhic Codruim nan rón” (Clan MacCodrum of the seals).

In the village of Kilshanig, two miles north-east of Castlegregory, there lived at one time a fine, brave young man named Tom Moore, a good dancer and singer. ‘Tis often he was heard singing among the cliffs and in the fields of a night.

Tom’s father and mother died and he was alone in the house and in need of a wife. One morning early, when he was at work near the strand, he saw the finest woman ever seen in that part of the kingdom, sitting on a rock, fast asleep. The tide was gone from the rocks then, and Tom was curious to know who was she or what brought her, so he walked toward the rock.

“Wake up!” cried Tom to the woman; “if the tide comes ’twill drown you.”

She raised her head and only laughed. Tom left her there, but as he was going he turned every minute to look at the woman. When he came back be caught the spade, but couldn’t work; he had to look at the beautiful woman on the rock. At last the tide swept over the rock. He threw the spade down and away to the strand with him, but she slipped into the sea and he saw no more of her that time.

Tom spent the day cursing himself for not taking the woman from the rock when it was God that sent her to him. He couldn’t work out the day. He went home.

Tom could not sleep a wink all that night. He was up early next morning and went to the rock. The woman was there. He called to her.

No answer. He went up to the rock. “You may as well come home with me now,” said Tom. Not a word from the woman. Tom took the hood from her head and said, “I’ll have this!”

The moment be did that she cried: “Give back my hood, Tom Moore!”

“Indeed I will not, for ’twas God sent you to me, and now that you have speech I’m well satisfied! And taking her by the arm he led her to the house. The woman cooked breakfast, and they sat down together to eat it.

“Now,” said Tom, “in the name of God you and I’ll go to the priest and get married, for the neighbours around here are very watchful; they’d be talking.” So after breakfast they went to the priest, and Tom asked him to marry them.

“Where did you get the wife?” asked the priest.

Tom told the whole story. When the priest saw Tom was so anxious to marry be charged £5, and Tom paid the money. He took the wife home with him, and she was as good a woman as ever went into a man’s house. She lived with Tom seven years, and had three sons and two daughters.

One day Tom was ploughing, and some part of the plough rigging broke. He thought there were bolts on the loft at home, so he climbed up to get them. He threw down bags and ropes while he was looking for the bolts, and what should he throw down but the hood which he took from the wife seven years before. She saw it the moment it fell, picked it up, and hid it. At that time people heard a great seal roaring out in the sea.

“Ah,” said Tom’s wife, “that’s my brother looking for me.”

Some men who were hunting killed three seals that day. All the women of the village ran down to the strand to look at the seals, and Tom’s wife with the others. She began to moan, and going up to the dead seals she spoke some words to each and then cried out, “Oh, the murder!”

When they saw her crying the men said: “We’ll have nothing more to do with these seals.” So they dug a great hole, and the three seals were put into it and covered. But some thought in the night: “Tis a great shame to bury those seals, after all the trouble in taking them.” Those men went with shovels and dug up the earth, but found no trace of the seals.

All this time the big seal in the sea was roaring. Next day when Tom was at work his wife swept the house, put everything in order, washed the children and combed their hair; then, taking them one by one, she kissed each. She went next to the rock, and, putting the hood on her head, gave a plunge. That moment the big seal rose and roared so that people ten miles away could hear him.

Tom’s wife went away with the seal swimming in the sea. All the five children that she left had webs between their fingers and toes, half-way to the tips.

The descendants of Tom Moore and the seal woman are living near Castlegregory to this day, and the webs are not gone yet from between their fingers and toes, though decreasing with each generation.

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Poetry: Ira Cohen, 3 more…

Atlantis Express

Let’s take a silver train underground

to the back streets of Atlantis

thru the corrugated iron roots &

then to the peak itself, to the

saddle of the last ridge past strewn

boulders,

finally meandering thru cascading snow

wearing miner’s hats on the perpendicular

dark night &

going up to the edge of the Southern Cross

where we reach at last the pure white

glistening glaciers &

begin to chant over bones in rags

of Scorpio

Armless in the sticky substance how could

they ever have had a chance?

Permission will not be required

only poems of blood offered to

the memory of TREE

It is not ice which is eternal

but the fury of the absolute

separating the void from the spirit

of man,

uplifting like life when it is used

against itself,

that is, Radical Love — & again, we

are reduced to living beings

Caught by the instant

we are taken away

We live in the imprint of the flame

& we are helmeted within the internal

blackness

where the ray begins its passage

across the indignant sky

Vain clouds uncaring in a tangle of

crossbeams

culminate in the hermaphroditic mirror

of the epileptic dancer

asleep

And during sleep

the light is joined

to the light

It is all a matter of getting up

and then to abandon the pain

It is there that the journey beings

in the self generated flame of

Spontaneous Combustion

(Swayambhunath)

The main line running counter

to the triangle comprising the

MAELSTROM, the DOLDROMS & the

SARGASSO SEA where sleeping Atlanteans

dream forever,

this line, this battlefield of the ages,

crosses the divide of my most wandering

backdoor heart.

We will all have to go

if we want to reappear

in the rhythm of the ritual

It’s the wheel of fools spinning

over my bed

If I put my left foot first

they will find a way to call me

by that name

tracking tremors

like glyphs

on drunken walls

in the negative palace

just before taking eave

of my senses

the white powder dissolves

in the sunlight

& making noise like a peacock

he hops on one foot up the mountain.

—

Song to Nothing

And surely we will die without memory

coming to cold in the shadow of space

& if it isn’t too late

for the star to love you

spraying the sky w/ whispers

attuned to galaxies hungry for flame

And if the tongue of night sings

of Albino winos

till the morning light shafts

the doorway

then surely we will die tonight

faceless at the White

Gate

sharing the smoke

w/ ancient shapes in future garb

and you stand somewhere there

on the other side

feeding on the pain of dreamlessness

Wherefrom the misty morning of

white shadows

& the unresisting need to destroy?

Samael, Samael, I beg it may be forgiven

that they may be driven

out of the black into the white

Only let the dazzle remain

for gamblers to surprise,

the strategic diamond, the throne

of compressed bone

in the unshored dark

where only light can forgive

& your mind is singed

Embers of echoes in the vastness

disguise the yearning to burn

blind eyes

in arrogant displays of feeling—

Running wild these beasts will feast

on the newborn kind

for surely we will die tonight

unless we learn to ignore

what the others live for

on the other side of morning

& the Skin of Nothing left by the same

summer

masks the faceless wanderer

O let it happen,

this weird to discover

the shape of Beauty in everything

extreme

for surely we will die tonight

whether we will or whether we

dream

O Samael, forgive the dreamer

forgive the dream

The Song of Nothing is your lullabye.

—-

If my heart were made of bread

I would wait at least one moment

before breaking the sunrise —

The Arm of the Dorje

Sunyata – Song to the Winter Sun

There was much wind

but I new not how to call it,

a roomful of strangers,

how familiar the feeling,

how cold it must be – barefoot

at the fountain when the sun goes down,

how the brown people love the blond baby

The white horse which looks out

from the wall suggests a journey

I once might have taken,

a covered memory reeking of sulphur

Words, they can go anywhere,

can they tell me where I come from,

the name of my planet,

the empty space which was my home?

The condemned murderer longs for

a firing squad, knows

where to put the shadows

you keep inside –

Between hands there are worlds

of ashes & thunder,

silent collisions of meaning,

the utter sugar of nights

taken for granted

They say the sun rises every day,

that sleep is incidental

I say myself

& so I look for your face at dawn

rising over my grief, over

the twice told terrain, violet w/ciphers,

Suffused w/ yr eternal smile

I would offer my flesh to your tiger,

turn your stone wheels w/ my water

Longing for the peaks the stars say

it will be clear

Let us meet in the sky then

till we come closer down here.

The Day of the Basilisk – The Wayfarer’s Song

It started in the dark room

thinking that night had fallen at dawn

Then arising we glued red eyes

into the dry sockets of a dead bird

its belly full of dirty cotton

Then across the paddies & out of

the town

where familiar figures of Kleist &

Eschenbach

rise from the road in eddies of dust

The voice of the Changeling names the day,

the day of the Basilisk, usurped

from the tyrant’s quest to know

how not to maim the Gilded Hind of

self knowledge

Licchavi sirens shortchanged of a renaissance

spread out cracked wooden arms,

split skulls of haunting beauty, smiling

Mud murtis made by nature distract

Goethean comments fearful of what is hidden

while the delicate head of Mahadev

whittled by the wind

still seals the lingam in the ancient temple

We look with Mudusa’s eyes

at the first born fruits,

the full breasts of the river

where there is no infidelity –

The golden larva w/ the royal face of Narayan,

hold it by its tail & call it by its name

Narayan, Narayan

it will dance for you & shake its head,

it lives only on air –we do not know if

it is alive or if it is dead, so gilded

its beauty

The face of Vishnu etches a dream of

ancient seas tinted w/ fallen light

Your face is everywhere

Your glory rings out over the peaks

capped w/ flame

Your shadow is enclosed within your shadow

You watch yourself falling

While falling you watch yourself looking down

You want to pick up the Tamang corpse

no one will touch

You call the children of darkness,

refute the wasted years of salt

poured into furrows

You see the thread needled to the hem of Night

betrayed by the shinbone of Day

where the fear is burned away

You look w/ basilisk eyes

turning the day to stone,

touched & transfigured

by the human, by the changing,

by the eternal, the always repeating

Alone.

Dhulikel/Panauti

(Astarte – 1926 Nicholas Kalmakoff)

___________

Still working on the fund raising for the radio, we are getting closer with the help we have been receiving! Still a ways to go, if you can help out, that would be super!

Click on to Donate :

This edition being a weekend one in linkless. In it you will find artwork hardly ever seen, by the visionary artist Nicholas Kalmakoff… More of his stuff coming soon. I have included a video of Jeff Buckley, late lamented singer, son of Tim Buckley. Wonderful stuff.

Out to clean up my bicycle, more later…

Gwyllm

______

On The Menu:

Hallelujah -Jeff Buckley

w/Lyrics by L. Cohen

The Horned Woman – Lady Gray

3 Poems – Ira Cohen

Art by Nicholas Kalmakoff

Glorious Stuff this, I hope you enjoy the Art!

In 1955, a Russian émigré died alone, unknown and in poverty at the hôpital de Lagny to the north of Paris. After leading a hermit’s existence in his small room at the hotel de la Rochefoucault in Paris, this former Russian aristocrat had created a fascinating body of work which, deemed eccentric and worthless, was locked away in storage and forgotten.

Throughout his solitary life, the artist had painted works that reflected his various obsessions with martyrdom, asceticism, decadence, spirituality and sexuality. Executed in a style marked by the Russian art nouveau, his imagery nevertheless transcended this movement, bearing undeniable traces of demented vision, indeed, genius.

Only in 1962 did some of his works come to light when Bertrand Collin du Bocage and Georges Martin du Nord discovered forty canvases in the Marché aux Puces, a large flea market to the north of Paris. All the works in this unusual collection were signed with a stylized ‘K’ monogram.

The Hungarian merchant who sold the lot to them included with it a poster of an exhibition held in Galerie Le Roy, Brussels, in 1924. Here, for the first time, the full name of the mysterious ‘K’ was revealed – Nicolas Kalmakoff….

_____________

“Hallelujah” – Leonard Cohen

Now I’ve heard there was a secret chord

That David played, and it pleased the Lord

But you don’t really care for music, do you?

It goes like this

The fourth, the fifth

The minor fall, the major lift

The baffled king composing Hallelujah

Hallelujah

Hallelujah

Hallelujah

Hallelujah

Your faith was strong but you needed proof

You saw her bathing on the roof

Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you

She tied you

To a kitchen chair

She broke your throne, and she cut your hair

And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah

You say I took the name in vain

I don’t even know the name

But if I did, well really, what’s it to you?

There’s a blaze of light

In every word

It doesn’t matter which you heard

The holy or the broken Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah

I did my best, it wasn’t much

I couldn’t feel, so I tried to touch

I’ve told the truth, I didn’t come to fool you

And even though

It all went wrong

I’ll stand before the Lord of Song

With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah

Hallelujah

___________________

THE HORNED WOMEN

Lady Wilde

(The Apparition – Nicholas Kalmakoff)

A rich woman sat up late one night carding and preparing wool, while all the family and servants were asleep. Suddenly a knock was given at the door, and a voice called–”Open! open!”

“Who is there?” said the woman of the house.

“I am the Witch of the one Horn,” was answered.

The mistress, supposing that one of her neighbours had called and required assistance, opened the door, and a woman entered, having in her hand a pair of wool carders, and bearing a horn on her forehead, as if growing there. She sat down by the fire in silence, and began to card the wool with violent haste. Suddenly she paused, and said aloud: “Where are the women? they delay too long.”

Then a second knock came to the door, and a voice called as before, “Open! open!”

The mistress felt herself constrained to rise and open to the call, and immediately a second witch entered, having two horns on her forehead, and in her hand a wheel for spinning wool.

“Give me place,” she said, “I am the Witch of the two Horns,” and she began to spin as quick as lightning.

And so the knocks went on, and the call was heard, and the witches entered, until at last twelve women sat round the fire–the first with one horn, the last with twelve horns.

And they carded the thread, and turned their spinning wheels, and wound and wove.

All singing together an ancient rhyme, but no word did they speak to the mistress of the house. Strange to hear, and frightful to look upon, were these twelve women, with their horns and their wheels; and the mistress felt near to death, and she tried to rise that she might call for help, but she could not move, nor could she utter a word or a cry, for the spell of the witches was upon her.

Then one of them called to her in Irish, and said–

“Rise, woman, and make us a cake.” Then the mistress searched for a vessel to bring water from the well that she might mix the meal and make the cake, but she could find none.

And they said to her, “Take a sieve and bring water in it.”

And she took the sieve and went to the well; but the water poured from it, and she could fetch none for the cake, and she sat down by the well and wept.

Then a voice came by her and said, “Take yellow clay and moss, and bind them together, and plaster the sieve so that it will hold.” This she did, and the sieve held water for the cake; and the voice said again–

“Return, and when thou comest to the north angle of the house, cry aloud three times and say, ‘The mountain of the Fenian women and the sky over it is all on fire’.”

And she did so.

When the witches inside heard the call, a great and terrible cry broke from their lips, and they rushed forth with wild lamentations and shrieks, and fled away to Slievenamon, 1 where was their chief abode. But the Spirit of the Well bade the mistress of the house to enter and prepare her home against the enchantments of witches if they returned again.

And first, to break their spells, she sprinkled the water in which she had washed her child’s feet (the feet-water) outside the door on the threshold; secondly, she took the cake which the witches had made in her absence of meal mixed with the blood drawn from the sleeping family, and she broke the cake in bits, and placed a bit in the mouth of each sleeper, and they were restored; and she took the cloth they had woven and placed it half in and half out of the chest with the padlock; and lastly, she secured the door with a great crossbeam fastened in the jambs, so that they could not enter, and having done these things she waited.

Not long were the witches in coming back, and they raged and called for vengeance.

“Open! open!” they screamed, “open, feet-water!”

“I cannot,” said the feet-water, “I am scattered on the ground, and my path is down to the Lough.”

“Open, open, wood and trees and beam!” they cried to the door.

“I cannot,” said the door, “for the beam is fixed in the jambs and I have no power to move.”

“Open, open, cake that we have made and mingled with blood!” they cried again.

“I cannot,” said the cake, “for I am broken and bruised, and my blood is on the lips of the sleeping children.” Then the witches rushed through the air with great cries, and fled back to Slievenamon, uttering strange curses on the Spirit of the Well, who had wished their ruin; but the woman and the house were left in peace, and a mantle dropped by one of the witches in her flight was kept hung up by the mistress as a sign of the night’s awful contest; and this mantle was in possession of the same family from generation to generation for five hundred years after.

(Leda – Nicolas Kalmakoff)

___________

3 Poems – Ira Cohen

Imagine Jean Cocteau

Imagine Jean Cocteau in the lobby

holding a torch

Imagine a trained dog act,

a Rock and Roll Band

Imagine I am Curly of the Three Stooges

disguised as Wm Shakespeare

Imagine that I’m the cousin of the Mayor

of New York or the King of Nepal

(I didn’t say Napoleon!)

Imagine what it is like to be in the glare

of hot lights when you are longing for dark

corners

Imagine the Ghost Patrol, the Tribal

Orchestra –

Imagine an elephant playing a harmonica

or someone weighing out bones on the edge

of the desert in Afghanistan

Imagine that these poems are recorded moments

of temporary sanity

Imagine that the clock was just turned back –

or forwards — a hundred years instead of an hour

Let us pretend that we have no place to go,

that we are here in the Cosmic Hotel,

that our bags are packed & that we have one hour

to checkout time

Imagine whatever you will but know that it is not

imagination but experience which makes poetry,

and that behind every image,

behind every word there is something

I am trying to tell you,

something that really happened.

——-

An Act of Jeopardy – for Garcia Lorca

A star of blood you fell

from the point of the hypodermic

singing of fabulous beasts &

spitting out the sex of vowels

Your poems explode in the mouth

like torrents of sperm on a night

full of zebras & bootheels

Your ghost still cruses the river-

fronts of midnight assignations

in a world of dead sailors carrying

armfuls of flowers in search of

your unmarked grave

Your body no sanctuary for bees,

Death was your lover in a rain of

broken obelisks & rotting orchids

In the tangled rose of a single heartbeat

I offer you the shadow of a double

profile,

two heads held together at the bridge

of the nose by a nail of opium

smoke

in the long night’s dreaming

& memory of water poured between

glasses

In my mailbox I find a letter from

a dead man & know that for every

shadow given

one is taken away

Yet subtraction is only a special form of

addition and implies a world of hidden

intentions below a horizon of lips

thin as your fingernail sprouting

mysteries in the earth

The ace of spades dealt from the bottom

of the deck severs the hand which

retrieves it & the eyes of Beauty

sewn together peer over a black lace fan

in the vulgar sunlight of a Spanish

morning without horses

The Belt of Orion is loosened

before you as you remove the silver

fingerstalls from your mummy hands &

kneel to plunder the nightsky in a shower of

bitter diamonds.

(Somewhere under a blanket someone weeps

for a lover.)

Peace to your soul

& to your empty shoes

in the dark closets of

kings with no feet!!!

—

From The Moroccan Journal – 1987

My heart feels like an uncut diamond

Though it is still the same, it is not the same

Someone speaks of a bridge to be built from Tangier

to Algeciras or is it Gibraltar?

“Yes & then a highway to the stars or more likely

an elevator to the Underworld,” says Yellow Turban

To White Jellaba as the exhaust fumes from the bus

engulf them, leaving behind not even a single

shadow.

Is that Mel Clay in a white jacket turning the corner?

No, it is a figment of my imagination escaped from the

asylum.

Is that Ian Sommerville walking backwards up the street

as if pulled by a giant magnet?

No, that is Wm. Burroughs making electricity

from dead cats.

Is that Tatiana glistening on Maxiton?

No, that is the sun dancing in the sugar bowl.

Is that Marc Schelfer wavering on the cliffedge?

No, it is a promontory in the wind of time

about to fall in the sea.

Is that Beethoven’s 9th Symphony being played

up the street?

No, it is the sound of the breadwagons

rumbling over cobblestones

Is that George Andrews with two girls in hand

looking for bread?

No, it is an unidentified flying object about to land.

Is that One-eyed Mose hanging by his heels?

No, that is the hanged man inventing the Taro.

Are the dead really so fascinated by lovemaking?

Yes, that is how they travel.

Is that Irving in short pants looking for trouble?

No, that’s me unable to stop thinking.

Is that Kenneth Halliwell looking for Joe Orton?

Is that Jane Bowles looking for Sherifa, Rosalind looking

for her baby, Alfred searching for his lost hair?

Is that the wig of it all, the patched robe of my brain,

the wind talking to itself?

Brion is dead and Yacoubi is dead, and I am a not unhappy

ghost remembering everything, the warp & woof of memories,

her yellow slip, her shaved cunt, her idiot child.

Dream shuttle makes me exist everywhere at once.

The blind beggars led by children keep coming.

“They all have many houses in the Casbah,”

chant the unbelievers sucking on sugar.

Words keep coming back like Bezezel for tits, Lictcheen

for oranges, like Mina, like Fatima, like Driss Berrada

dropping his trousers for an injection in the middle

of his shop.

The trunk is full of old sepia postcards,

barebreasted girls smoking hookahs etcetera.

We speak of the cataplana, the mist which obscures

even the cielo you cannot even see the hand in front

of your face.

We embrace, he says he thought of me only yesterday,

he says there are always nine such men who look like us

in the world and that we are the tenth.

We speak of the gold filets in the sky over Moulay Absalom.

The garbage men in rubber boots go thru the Socco pushing

wheeled drums of collected garbage.

An unveiled woman wobbles out of a taxi and heads home

before sunrise.

Paul couldn’t believe that was a Karma Street,

but I will never forget it.

And Billy Batman, who made the best hash in the world,

he dropped a loaded pistol in Kabul, shot himself in the balls,

took some heroin and lay down to die.

Now I must get up from my table in the allnight Café Central.

No more Dr. Nadal, no more window with red crosses & red

crescents.

The water thrown from buckets runs across the café floors

& over the sidewalks & I drop a dirham into the hand

of a blind beggar singing in the dark on the American stairs

(From Anais Nin’s -A Spy in the House of Love- ” The women wear fireflies in their hair, but the fireflies stop shining when they go to sleep so now and then the women had to rub the fire- flies to keep them awake.”

(Stage Design: The Serpentine Crypt – c 1910 Nicholas Kalmakoff)

(La Crypte Vermiculaire)

(Solitude – ALBERT LORIEUX)

Well, here we are at the end of the week. I am helping my friend Paul on a kitchen over in North Portland. We put up the drywall ceiling yesterday… The lady who owns the house has two nice dogs, who wanted to be right there, in the middle of things all the time. When I got home Sofie went a bit nuts with jealousy from the smells….

Still working on the fund raising for the radio, it is moving slower than I imagined it would. If you want to help out, this would be a great time to do it!

Click on to Donate :

On the Menu

The Links

Arthur Lee… passes on

Fairies Or No Fairies

Connla and the Fairy Maiden

Poets Against War – Poems of the Week

Have a good Friday!

Blessings.

Gwyllm

_________

Links…

Crazy Claws…

Dog destroys £40,000 Elvis teddy

Exit Without Saving…

_________

GoodBye Arthur… We’ll miss ya!

__________

Fairies Or No Fairies

JOHN MULLIGAN was as fine an old fellow as ever threw a Carlow spur into the sides of a horse. He was, besides, as jolly a boon companion over a jug of punch as you would meet from Carnsore Point to Bloody Farland. And a good horse he used to ride; and a stiffer jug of punch than his was not in nineteen baronies. May be he stuck more to it than he ought to have done-but that is nothing whatever to the story I am going to tell.

John believed devoutly in fairies; and an angry man was he if you doubted them. He had more fairy stories than would make, if properly printed in a rivulet of print running down a meadow of margin, two thick quartos for Mr. Murray, of Albemarle street; all of which he used to tell on all occasions that he could find listeners. Many believed his stories – many more did not believe them – but nobody, in process of time, used to contradict the old gentleman, for it was a pity to vex him. But he had a couple of young neighbours who were just come down from their first vacation in Trinity College to spend the summer months with an uncle of theirs, Mr. Whaley, an old Cromwellian, who lived at Ballybegmullinahone, and they were too full of logic to let the old man have his own way undisputed.

Every story he told they laughed at, and said that it was impossible – that it was merely old woman’s gabble, and other such things. When he would insist that all his stories were derived from the most credible sources – nay, that some of them had been told him by his own grandmother, a very respectable old lady, but slightly affected in her faculties, as things that came under her own knowledge – they cut the matter short by declaring that she was in her dotage, and at the best of times had a strong propensity to pulling a long bow.

“But,” said they, “Jack Mulligan, did you ever see a fairy yourself?”

“Never,” was the reply. – Never, as I am a man of honour and credit.”

“Well, then,” they answered, ” until you do, do not be bothering us with any more tales of my grandmother.”

Jack was particularly nettled at this, and took up the: cudgels for his grandmother; but the younkers were too sharp for him, and finally he got into a passion, as people generally do who have the worst of an argument. This evening – it was at their uncle’s, an old crony of his with whom he had dined – he bad taken a large portion of his usual beverage, and was quite riotous. He at last got up in a passion, ordered his horse, and, in spite of his host’s entreaties, galloped off, although he had intended to have slept there, declaring that he would not have any thing more to do with a pair of jackanapes puppies, who, because they had learned how to read good-for-nothing hooks in cramp writing, and were taught by a parcel of wiggy, red-snouted, prating prigs, (“not,” added he, “however, that I say a man may not be a good man and have a red nose,”) they imagined they knew more than a man who had held buckle and tongue together facing the wind of the world for five dozen years.

He rode off in a fret, and galloped as hard as his horse Shaunbuie could powder away over the limestone. ” Damn it!” hiccupped he, ” Lord pardon me for swearing! the brats had me in one thing – I never did see a fairy; and I would give up five as good acres as ever grew apple-potatoes to get a glimpse of one – and, by the powers! what is that?”

He looked, and saw a gallant spectacle. His road lay by a noble demesne, gracefully sprinkled with trees, not thickly planted as in a dark forest, but disposed, now in clumps of five or six, now standing singly, towering over the plain of verdure around them, as a beautiful promontory arising out of the sea. He had come right opposite the glory of the wood. It was an oak, which in the oldest title-deeds of the county, and they were at least five hundred years old, was called the old oak of Ballinghassig. Age had hollowed its centre, but its massy boughs still waved with their dark serrated foliage. The moon was shining on it bright. If I were a poet, like Mr. Wordsworth, I should tell you how the beautiful light was broken into a thousand different fragments – and how it. filled the entire tree with a glorious flood, bathing every particular leaf, and showing forth every particular bough; but, as I am not a poet, I shall go on with my story. By this light Jack saw a, brilliant company of lovely little forms dancing under the oak with an unsteady and rolling motion. The company was large. Some spread out far beyond the furthest boundary of the shadow of the oak’s branches – some were seen glancing through the flashes of light shining through its leaves – some were barely visible, nestling under the trunk – some no doubt were entirely concealed from his eyes. Never did man see any thing more beautiful. They were not three inches in height, but they were white as the driven snow, and beyond number numberless. Jack threw the bridle over his horse’s neck, and drew up to the low wall which bounded the demesne, and leaning over it, surveyed, with infinite delight, their diversified gambols. By looking long at them, he soon saw objects which had not struck him at first; in particular that in the middle was a chief of superior stature, round whom the group appeared to move. He gazed so long that he was quite overcome with joy, and could not help shouting out, ” Bravo! little fellow,” said he, well kicked and strong.” But the instant he uttered the words the night was darkened, and the fairies vanished with the speed of lightning.

” I wish,” said Jack, “I had held my tongue; but no matter now. I shall just turn bridle about and go back to Ballybegmullinahone Castle, and beat the young Master Whaleys, fine reasoners as they think themselves, out of the field clean.”

No sooner said than done; and Jack was back again as if upon the wings of the wind. He rapped fiercely at the door, and called aloud for the two collegians.

” Hallo!” said he, “young Flatcaps, come down now, if you dare. Come down, if you dare, and I shall give you oc-oc-ocular demonstration of the truth of what I was saying.”

Old Whaley put his head out of the window, and said, “Jack Mulligan, what brings you back so soon?”

“The fairies,” shouted Jack; “the fairies!”

I am afraid,” muttered the Lord of Ballybegmullinahone, ” the last glass you took was too little watered: but, no matter – come in and cool yourself over a tumbler of punch.”

He came in and sat down again at table. In great spirits he told his story ; – how he had seen thousands and tens of thousands of fairies dancing about the old oak of Balllinghassig; he described their beautiful dresses of shining silver; their flat-crowned hats, glittering in the moonbeams; the princely stature and demeanour of the central figure. He added, that he heard them singing, and playing the most enchanting music; but this was merely imagination. The young men laughed, but Jack held his ground. “Suppose, said one of the lads, ” we join company with you on the road, and ride along to the place, where you saw that fine company of fairies?”

“Done!” cried Jack; “but I will not promise that you will find them there, for I saw them scudding up in the sky like a flight of bees, and heard their wings whizzing through the air.” This, you know, was a bounce, for Jack had heard no such thing.

Off rode the three, and came to the demesne of Oakwood. They arrived at the wall flanking the field where stood the great oak; and the moon, by this time, having again emerged from the clouds, shone bright as when Jack had passed. “Look there,” he cried, exultingly; for the same spectacle again caught his eyes, and he pointed to it with his horsewhip; ” look, and deny if you can. “

“Why,” said one of the lads, pausing, ” true it is that we do see a company of white creatures; but were they fairies ten time~ over, I shall go among them;” and he dismounted to climb over the wall.

“Ah, Tom Tom;” cried Jack, ” stop, man, stop! what are you doing? The fairies – the good people, I mean – hate to be meddled with. You will be pinched or bIinded; or your horse will cast its shoe; or – look! a wilful man will have his way. Oh! oh! he is almost at the oak – God help him! for he is past the help of man.”

By this time Tom was under the tree and burst out laughing. “Jack,” said he, “keep your prayers to yourself. Your fairies are not bad at all. I believe they will make tolerably good catsup.”

Catsup,” said Jack, who when he found that the two lads (for the second had followed his brother) were both laughing in the middle of the fairies, had dismounted and advanced slowly -What do you mean by catsup?”

“Nothing,” replied Tom, ” but that they are mushrooms (as indeed they were); and your Oberon is merely this overgrown puff-ball.”

Poor Mulligan gave a long whistle of amazement, staggered back to his horse without saying a word, and rode home in a hard gallop, never looking behind him. Many a long day was it before he ventured to face the laughers at Ballybegmullinahone; and to the day of his death the people of the parish, aye, and five parishes round, called him nothing but Musharoon Jack, such being their pronunciation of mushroom.

I should be sorry if all my fairy stories ended with so little dignity; but –

“These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits, and

Are melted into air – into thin air.”

______________

Connla and the Fairy Maiden

CONNLA of the Fiery Hair was son of Conn of the Hundred Fights. One day as he stood by the side of his father on the height of Usna, he saw a maiden clad in strange attire coming towards him.

“Whence comest thou, maiden?” said Connla.

“I come from the Plains of the Ever Living,” she said, “there where there is neither death nor sin. There we keep holiday alway, nor need we help from any in our joy. And in all our pleasure we have no strife. And because we have our homes in the round green hills, men call us the Hill Folk.”

The king and ail with him wondered much to hear a voice when they saw no one. For save Connla alone, none saw the Fairy Maiden.

“To whom art thou talking, my son? ” said Conn the king.

Then the maiden answered, “Connla speaks to a young, fair maid, whom neither death nor old age awaits. I love Connla, and now I call him away to the Plain of Pleasure,

Moy Mell, where Boadag is king for aye, nor has there been complaint or sorrow in that land since he has held the kingship. Oh, come with me, Connla of the Fiery Hair, ruddy as the dawn with thy tawny skin. A fairy crown awaits thee to grace thy comely face and royal form. Come, and never shall thy comeliness fade, nor thy youth, till the last awful day of judgment.”

The king in fear at what the maiden said, which he heard though he could not see her, called aloud to his Druid, Coran by name.

“Oh, Coran of the many spells,” he said, ” and of the cunning magic, I call upon thy aid. A task is upon me too great for all my skill and wit, greater than any laid upon me since I seized the kingship. A maiden unseen has met us, and by her power would take from me my dear, my comely son. If thou help not, he will be taken from thy king by woman’s wiles and witchery.”

Then Coran the Druid stood forth and chanted his spells towards the spot where the maiden’s voice had been heard. And none heard her voice again, nor could Connla see her longer. Only as she vanished before the Druid’s mighty spell, she threw an apple to Connla.

For a whole month from that day Connla would take nothing, either to eat or to drink, save only from that apple. But as he ate it grew again and always kept whole. And all the while there grew within him a mighty yearning and longing after the maiden he had seen.

But when the last day of the month of waiting came, Connla stood by the side of the king his father on the Plain of Arcomin, and again he saw the maiden come towards him, and again she spoke to him.

“‘Tis a glorious place, forsooth, that Connla holds among shortlived mortals awaiting the day of death. But now the folk of life, the ever-living ones, beg and bid thee come to Moy Mell, the Plain of Pleasure, for they have learnt to know thee, seeing thee in thy home among thy dear ones.

When Conn the king heard the maiden’s voice he called to his men aloud and said:

“Summon swift my Druid Coran, for I see she has again this day the power of speech.”

Then the maiden said ” Oh, mighty Conn, fighter of a hundred fights, the Druid’s power is little loved; it has little honour in the mighty land, peopled with so many of the upright. When the Law will come, it will do away with the Druid’s magic spells that come from the lips of the false black demon.”

Then Conn the king observed that since the maiden came Connla his son spoke to none that spake to him. So Conn of the hundred fights said to him, “Is it to thy mind what the woman says, my son?”

“‘Tis hard upon me,” then said Connla; “I love my own folk above all things; but yet, but yet a longing seizes me for the maiden.”

When the maiden heard this, she answered and said “The ocean is not so strong as the waves of thy longing. Come with me in my curragh, the gleaming, straight-gliding crystal canoe. Soon we can reach Boadag’s realm. I see the bright sun sink, yet far as it is, we can reach it before dark. There is, too, another land worthy of thy journey, a land joyous to all that seek it. Only wives and maidens dwell there. If thou wilt, we can seek it and live there alone together in joy.”

When the maiden ceased to speak, Connla of the Fiery Hair rushed away from them and sprang into the curragh, the gleaming, straight-gliding crystal canoe. And then they all, king and court, saw it glide away over the bright sea towards the setting sun. Away and away, till eye could see it no longer, and Connla and the Fairy Maiden went their way on the sea, and were no more seen, nor did any know where they came.

Jacobs, Joseph, ed. Celtic Fairy Tales.

___________

(Der Auserwählte – Ferdinand Hodler)

Poets Against War – Poems of the Week…

Helen Hensley

God Bless Our Troops – Microfridge in Room

The marquee outside the motel

was unintentionally ironic

I’m sure—probably the work

of some well-meaning but clueless

young man. I imagine him trying

to balance on an aluminum ladder,

while he carefully places each magnetic letter,

wondering if he should leave extra space

after “God Bless Our Troops”

and not quite sure whether microfridge

should be hyphenated or not.

As my car speeds past the sign,

my mind conjures up another young man

huddled wearily in the bombed-out remains

of a building, cradling his assault rifle

and sucking hard on a cigarette.

As he tries to ignore the sweltering heat

and the dirt and the fear that never goes away,

he wonders if he’ll ever sleep in a real bed

again, with a warm, sweet body

pressed close to his in a room

with a microfridge full of fresh food

and cold beer, just waiting

for him to taste it.

—

Shadab Zeest Hashmi

Shada Zeest Hashmi is originally from Pakistan. Her poems have been published in New Millenium Writings, Hubbub, The Bitter Oleander, Poetry Conspiracy and will appear in the forthcoming anthology Risen from the East. She is the editor of the annual Magee Park Poets Anthology.

U.S. Air Strikes

In the four minutes

it took me to mince the cloves,

dump the tea leaves

in the rose bush,

and soap the carafe,

a whole city was lost.

There were feet still in school shoes,

limp flesh singing into satchels,

clinging to a post, a shattered clock.

The children, if not orphaned,

were purpled beyond recognition.

Orders had been carried down,

one signal igniting another.

And a man had let a deafening rhapsody

guide his young hand to drop

a five hundred pound bomb

on a mosque.

Just when I finished rinsing the carafe,

a whole city was under cement dust and smoke,

and I thought I heard screaming behind walls of fire

in the kettle’s sharp whistle,

just when I added the cloves,

the last green lime.

—-

Jane Haladay

Jane Haladay, PhD, is a writer and scholar of Native/American Indian Studies whose home place is California. Her work focuses on the literatures of indigenous Americans, supporting native sovereignty, and the project of cross-cultural decolonization within institutionalized education.

Bloom

On this day,

these things happened:

Dentist.

Coffee with a good friend first.

Then shopping.

Oranges, toothpaste, eggs.

Home briefly.

Email, three bills.

Mundane, the activities

of twenty-one centuries.

Of longer millennia

amidst great change,

of sacred fires burning,

of oil burning

to its ultimate depletion

and to ours.

Outside,

thinking about this earth.

How it is to be of

and within her.

Walking,

I saw dark geraniums

the color of fresh blood.

Mowed weed fields

with magpies trolling.

At the edges of the lake,

yellow iris bloom

with only beauty

as intention while

black waters hold

the rippling undersides

of clouds

tenderly,

without

entrapment.

I have not forgotten war.

Brutality, grief, despair

blossom freshly

in the same

early April where

here and now

new life thrusts deeply

up from roots.

overhead,

dark birds fly beyond

white petals from

the plum trees that

drift slowly down

like ashes,

like bombs.

——–

( Der Traum – Pierre-Cécile Puvis de Chavannes)

(Parasamgate – Roberto Venosa)

We are still trying to sort out our relationship with our provider, Bluehost.com. As it stands, we are in the midst of fund raising to pay for the privelege of playing music commercial free. Gotta love how these things work.

Will talk later,

Gwyllm

On the Menu:

Cathedral Oceans

Fund Raiser & Thanks…

The Links

The Quotes

Ayahuasca Reading by Peter Lamborn Wilson

The Poetry Of Hafiz

Art – Roberto Venosa (Thank you Roberto!)

_____________

The Golden Flute

A sea of Peace and Joy and Light

Beyond my reach I know.

In me the storm-tossed weeping night

Finds room to rage and flow.

I cry aloud, but all in vain;

I helpless, the earth unkind

What soul of might can share my pain?

Death-dart alone I find.

A raft am I on the sea of Time,

My oars are washed away.

How can I hope to reach the clime

Of God’s eternal Day?

But hark! I hear Thy golden Flute,

Its notes bring the Summit down.

Now safe am I, O Absolute!

Gone death, gone night’s stark frown!

Hafiz

_____

I hope you can view Cathederal Oceans… One of my favourite artists, John Foxx’s “Oceans” has a nice haunting feel to it. He started originally with Ultravox as their vocalist, and has since moved on to perform and record with the likes of Harold Budd among others.

_____

Firstly, I would like to thank our generous contributors who have sent in donations. I am very grateful to you all. Thanks ever so much! We have had a very good start to the fund raising for Radio Free Earthrites due to the generosity that has been shown so far!

We are almost 1/3 there to paying the fees to allow the radio to be used again. If you can, please show your support for EarthRites Radio and help out.

Cheers,

Gwyllm

Click on to Donate :

________________

The Links:

‘Buddha rays’ spark statue-gazing

The Truth does come out…

The Brick Testament..

Allan Watts Podcast…

(Crystal Tree _Roberto Venosa)

_______________

The Quotes:

“Love is an exploding cigar we willingly smoke.”

“All that is human must retrograde if it does not advance.”

“I am prepared to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.” “Men live in a fantasy world. I know this because I am one, and I actually receive my mail there.”

“To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worthwhile. The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter.”

“Get all the fools on your side and you can be elected to anything.”

“We are born charming, fresh and spontaneous and must be civilized before we are fit to participate in society.”

“My idea of an agreeable person is a person who agrees with me.”

“Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.”

“To be pleased with one’s limits is a wretched state.”

“I was so naive as a kid I used to sneak behind the barn and do nothing.”

________________

Ayahuasca Reading

by Peter Lamborn Wilson

-Read by Peter Lamborn Wilson on WBAI 99.5FM NYC sometime in 1994 during one of his Ayahuasca shows (same as the icaro tape). In this audio transcription unknown words are spelled phonetically and marked with (sp) when they first appear.-

(Enlightenment -Roberto Venosa)

Ayahuasca Drinkers among the cha-ma (sp) Indians by Heinz ku-sel (sp) see what I mean? Originally appeared in the Psychedelic Review, 1965 Read from reprint in the Psychozoic Press I lived for seven years traveling and trading in the upper Amazon region and often heard stories about the effect of ayahuasca.

Once on a long canoe trip down the river my Indian companion had chanted the song of the Goddess of Ayahuasca. Ayahuasca, a Quechua word meaning ‘vine of death’ is the collective name for various climbing tropical lianas and also designates the tea prepared from the leaves of the vine, either by itself or in combination with other leaves. Indians and the Mestizos alike visit the ayahuasquero or witch-doctor when they are ailing or think they need a general check-up, or want to make an important decision, or simply because they feel like it.

Among the scattered half-casts and natives of the swamps and rainforests of the Ucayali region the ayahuasca cult plays a significant role in their religious medical practices and provides them with a good deal of entertainment. Repeatedly I heard how in a vision induced by drinking the tea prepared from the liana the patient had perceived the specific plant needed for his cure – had later searched and found it in the jungle and had subsequently recovered.

To the enigmatic mind of the Indian ayahuasca opens the gate to the healing properties of the forces of nature at whose mercy he lives. A recurrent theme whenever the natives refer to the results of the drug is the vision of the ‘Procession of Plants,’ with garlic, ‘the king of the good plants’ leading the way. Garlic, tobacco, quinine and oh-hey (sp), a tree latex, are at the head of a long line of friendly elf-like plants which, in ayahuasca visions, bow to mankind, offering their services. The Campa Indians, sturdy fellows, who today specialize in drawing mahogany and cedar logs for the sawmills in Iquitos undergo a purge of ayahuasca before they enter the flooded areas of the forest to float out the logs and assemble them into tremendous rafts. For a cure of that nature they prepare themselves by a prolonged diet, avoiding meat, salt, alcohol and sugar.

Aside from the main use of the drug for curing or keeping the consumer in good general condition, ayahuasca will, according to its users, induce clairvoyance and may for example solve a theft or prophesy the success or failure of a given enterprise. A man might be planning a trip to a certain river where he knows of a good place to tap rubber, but to be sure of good results he will consult ayahuasca first. After that, more than likely, he will abandon the enterprise altogether and set off in another direction to pan gold, hunt peck-oh-re (sp) or do something else.

In these unhurried hours and days I arrived at an insight into the native’s fantastic beliefs and images, the richness of which is equaled only by the growth of the surrounding vegetation. Their superstitions, ideas and images freely cross and recross the borderline of reality in strangely patterned ways. Their stories have one thing in common – man, plant and animal are one, forever woven into an inextricable pattern of cause and effect. Later I found that ayahuasca visions are fabrics that illustrate endless combinations of this pattern. Man, plant and animal also passively undergo the irradiations of each other. Irradiations of powers that to us are mostly non-existent. Somehow sometimes they even acquire each other’s characteristics.

Once, while drifting in a canoe the Campa Indian with me disturbed the silence by imitating the voice of the kuto-mono (sp), a copper colored monkey. A kuto-mono from the shore answered him, a third joined in. After a while the whole shoreline seems to come alive with kuto-monos. The natives use this ability to imitate voices to such a degree that hunting takes on the character of treacherous assassination. Though hardly in the way of an equivalent, the animal world puts out a bird that I heard one night on the pa-cha-tey-ah (sp) River. It filled the darkness with an ascending scale of glass clear notes. Quite likely it is a beautiful scale but nevertheless it resembles the hysterical laughter of an insane women. It shocked me. I felt upset, mocked, laughed at. Everything calls in the jungle.

Once a Campa Indian in my boat when we were drifting far from the shore was called by ayahuasca! He followed the call and later emerged from the forest with the a sampling of the fairly rare liana that today is cultivated by the ayahuasquero in secret spots. I myself certainly did not hear the call.

If this jungle life and its irrational mutual dependency forms a picture of general confusion, ayahuasca is the magic mirror that reflects this confusion as something beautiful and attractive. For whomever I listened to, all manifested the enjoyment of a wondrous spectacle that was pleasing to the senses. If fearsome visions occurred they said that the ayahuasquero could easily dispel them by shaking a dry twig near the ear of the affected drinker; or by blowing the smoke of a cigarette on the crown of his head. The aesthetic climax of the spectacle was, they claimed, the ‘vision of the goddess with concealed eyes,’ who dwelt inside the twining tropical vine.

Many times I listened to these tales but it never crossed my mind to try the liana myself. It belonged definitely to the local Indian lore, to something sordid, outside of the law, something publicly frowned upon like the binding up of the heads that the cha-ma (sp) practice on their babies; or like burying one twin alive as they also do; or so many other equally fantastic or ghastly things.

In 1949 I had my headquarters in a white washed brick house in pu-cul-pa overlooking a wide curve of the Ucayali. Pu-cul-pa at that time was a village of about 200 homes, a Catholic church, an American Protestant mission, a Masonic temple and two primitive hotels. The place had gained some importance by being at the end of the only road precariously connecting Lima and the Pacific with a navigable river of the Amazon system. It also had an airport which could be used when the ground was dry. After the war and the falling of prices for rubber, the importance of the road decreased and Pu-cul-pa fell back into the stagnation of a Peruvian jungle settlement.

At that time I realized that my days in the jungle were coming to an end and in spite of being somewhat skeptical about the possible effects of the drug, I decided to try it. I drank the bitter salty extract of the vine three times. It seemed too much trouble to look for a venerated great ayahuasquero like Juan in-uma (sp) who lived up the river near masi-eh-sia (sp). There were a number of less widely esteemed fellows in pu- cul-pa such as no-lore-bey (sp) who was recommended to me as the most reliable of the witch doctors in the village. Hs hut was the last upstream in the long row of buildings above the steep shore of pu-cul-pa.

It was there that I found myself sitting on an empty gasoline crate while other people squatted on the floor. I drank the required dose, about a quart, and nothing happened. The only noticeable effect was an increased auditory sensitivity which is the reason why the drug is usually consumed in secluded places at night. A neighborhood rooster crowed recklessly which upset me considerably for it seemed to happen right inside my head. The people in the hut were disturbed also – they sighed and shifted their positions uneasily. No-lore-bey blamed the ineffectiveness of the drug on the fact that it had not been freshly prepared.

Another evening the guide who carried my blanket led me to a hut far outside the limits of the village. The hut, a typical structure of a floor on stilts without walls covered by a thatched roof, belonged to sal-dani-ah (sp), a mestizo I did not particularly like who had many patients in the village. I lay down on the raised floor of beaten palm bark, overlooking the clearing, and sal-dani-ah handed me a bottle of ayahuasca. I started to drink and heard him singing behind a partition where he was tending his patients. I listened carefully to the startling song that is always sung in ken-cha (sp), the language of the highland Indians which only old people in the Ucayali region speak. The song starts with a shrill musical question and continues with a series of answers intermixed with hissing sounds and syncopated with guttural noises produced with the tongue against the palate.

I drank the whole dose sal-dani-ah had prepared for me and felt slightly dizzy and nauseated. After a while I climbed down from the raised floor using the ladder, made as usual by hacking footholds into an upright log. The clearing and surrounding jungle looked as though covered with white ashes in the strong moonlight. From the hut behind me I heard sound of voices speaking monotonously. I heard sal-dani-ah intermittently singing the song or administering his cures. One of the procedures used to relieve a pain is actually to suck the pain out of the hurting member. When this has been often enough the pain is supposed to be located in the doctor’s mouth and removed from there by spitting. Again my stimulated hearing reported those awful noises so intensely that at times they were hard to endure.

The next day sal-dani-ah attributed this failure to the fact that I has a slight cold. I was more skeptical than ever. After all, if unlike those people, I was not able to hear the call of the plant, or to walk noiselessly through the jungle maybe I lacked also the required acuteness of senses to meet the iridescent goddess.

I am glad that I went a third time. I made another appointment with no-lore-bey for a Saturday night. I walked out to his place at the edge of the forest at about 10pm. I realized that his one room house that stood in darkness and silence was crowded and waited outside till he emerged. I told him that I would rather not join the crowd and he obligingly showed me a good-sized canoe pulled up for repairs and resting about twenty feet from the cane wall of his shack towards the edge of the jungle. I wrapped myself in a blanket and lay down comfortably; my shoulders against the cedar walls of the dugout – my head resting on the slanting stern. I felt relaxed and full of expectation. No-lore-bey had appeared eager and confident. A small barefooted Indian with something queer and slightly funny about his face he showed a nervousness that did not go with his sturdy build. He seemed to be never quite present as if continuously distracted by frequent encounters with his vegetable gods and devils. His eyes were not steady but pulled in different directions. While something fearful, there was something very happy about this man, as if a hidden gaiety were buried under his worried features. He believed himself smart and powerful. He lived a glorious life, even if sometimes he seemed to go to pieces in his effort to walk back and forth professionally between two equally puzzling worlds. I remembered seeing him once in the como-sari-ah (sp) in conflict with one of them (one of those equally puzzling worlds), accused again of leading a disorderly life and practicing quackery. He was standing in his formerly green trousers before a wooden table and the Peruvian flag answering the rude guardia-seville (sp) with a humble smile – his eyes going apologetically in all directions.

He soon appeared with a gourd full of liquid he had carefully prepared by stewing for hours the leaves of the vine with those of another plant who’s name possibly was his secret. He squatted at the canoe and whispered, his eyes going sideways, ‘Gringo, today you will experience the real thing. I will serve you well. We will have the true intoxication. You will be satisfied, wait and see..’ and he left me alone.

After a while a girl approached me from the hut and asked for a cigarette. She lighted it, inhaled, and for a moment I saw her wide face surrounded by hard black hair, then she walked noiselessly back into the hut. A two-eye-oh (sp) bird began to call repeatedly high above my face. The whistling and melodious sound at the end of his call seemed to touch me like a whiplash. A truck loaded with cedar boards left the village and on the distant highway accelerated madly and shifted gears. By that time I knew the drug was working in me. I felt fine and heard no- lore-bey whispering near my ear again, ‘Do you want more? Shall I give you more? Do you want to see the Goddess well?’ And again I drank the full gourd of cool bitter liquid. I cannot say how often no-lore-bey was present whispering and drinking with me, singing the song near my ear and far away, treating his patients and making those awful primitive noises that I despised. There was another sound that upset me more than anything, like something round falling into a deep well, a mysterious, slippery and indecent sound. Much later I found out that it was produced by normally innocuous action of no-lore-bey ladling water out of an old oil barrel by means of a small gourd. I yawned through what seemed to be an interminable night till the muscles of my face were strained. Sometimes I yawned so hard that it seemed to me as loud as the roaring of the sea on a rocky coast. Things got so gay, absorbing and beautiful that I had to laugh foolishly. The laughter came out of my insides of its own accord and shook me absurdly. At the same time I cried, and the tears that were running down my face were annoying, but they kept running madly and no matter how often I wiped my cheeks I could not dry them.

(Garden ofDelights-Roberto Venosa)

The first visual experience was like fireworks. Then a continuously creating power produced a wealth of simple and elaborate flat patterns and color. There were patterns that consisted of twining repeats and others geometrically organized with rectangles or squares that were like Maya designs or those decorations which the cha-ma paint of their thin ringing pottery. The visions were in constant flux. First intermittently, then successively the flat patterns gave way to deep brown, purple or beige depths like dimly lighted caves in which the walls were too far away to be perceived. At times snake- like stems of plants were growing profusely in the depths, at others these were covered with arrangements of myriads of lights that, like dewdrops of gems, adorned them. Now and then brilliant light illuminated the scene as though by photographic flash showing wide landscapes with trees placed at regular intervals or just empty plains. A big ship with many flags appeared in one of these flashes. A merry-go-round with people dressed in brightly colored garments in another. The song of no-lore-bey in the background seemed to physically touch a brain-center, and each of his hissing, guttural syncopations hurt and started new centers of hallucinations which kept on moving and changing to the rhythm of his chant. At a certain point I felt helplessly that no-lore- bey and his song could do ANYTHING with me. There was one note in his song that came back again and again which made me slide deeper whenever it appeared, deeper and deeper into a place where I might lose consciousness. If, to reassure myself, I opened my eyes, I saw the dark wall of the jungle covered with jewels – as if a net of lights had been thrown over it. Upon closing my eyes again I could renew the procession of slick, well-lighted images.

There were two very definite attractions. I enjoyed the unreality of a created world. The images casual, accidental or imperfect but fully organized to the last detail of highly complex, consistent, yet forever changing, designs. They were harmonized in color and had a slick sensuous polished finish. The other attraction of which I was very conscious at the time was inexplicable sensation of intimacy with the visions. They were mine and concerned only me. I remembered an Indian telling me that whenever he drank ayahuasca he had such beautiful visions that used to put his hands over his eyes for fear someone might steal them. I felt the same way. The color scheme became a harmony of browns and greens. Naked dancers appeared turning slowly in spiral movements. Spots of brassy lights played on their bodies which gave them the texture of polished stone. Their faces were inclined and hidden in deep shadows. Their coming into existence in the center of the vision coincided with the rhythm of no-lore-bey’s song and they advanced forward and to the sides, turning slowly. I longed to see their faces. At last the whole field of vision was taken up by a single dancer with inclined face covered by a raised arm. As my desire to see the face became unendurable it appeared suddenly in full close-up, with closed eyes. I knew that when the extraordinary face opened those eyes I experienced a satisfaction of a kind I had never known. It was the visual solution of a personal riddle. I got up and walked away without disturbing no-lore-bey. When I arrived home I was still subject to uncontrollable fits of yawning and laughter. I sat down before my house. I remembered that a drop of dew fell from the tin roof and that its impact was so noisy that it made me shudder. I looked at my watch and realized it was not yet midnight. The next day, and for quite some time I felt unusually well.

Three years later in a letter from pu-cul-pa I heard that no-lore-bey had been accused of bewitching a man into insanity and had been jailed in Iquitos.

_________________

(Return To Source-Roberto Venosa)

The Poetry Of Hafiz

A Grievous Folly Shames My Sixtieth Year

A grievous folly shames my sixtieth year—

My white head is in love with a green maid;

I kept my heart a secret, but at last

I am betrayed.

Like a mere child I walked into the snare;

My foolish heart followed my foolish eyes;

And yet, when I was young—in ages past—

I was so wise.

If only she who can such wonders do

Could from my cheeks time’s calumny erase,

And change the color of my snow-white locks—

Give a young face

To my young heart, and make my old eyes new,

Bidding my outside tell the inward truth!

O! It is a shallow wit with which time mocks

An old man’s youth!

Ah! it was always so with us who sing!

Children of fancy, we are in the power

Of any dream, and at the bidding we

Of a mere flower;

Yet Hafiz, though full many a foolish thing

Ensnared your heart with wonder, never were

you wont to be imagination’s slave

As you are now.

—

We are Deep in Love with Solitude

Now that the rose bush in its dainty hand

Lifts high its brimming cup of blood-red wine,

And green buds thicken in the empty land,

Heart, climb out of speculation’s mine

And seek the grassy wilderness with me.

Who cares for problems, human or divine!

The dew of morning glitters like a sea,

And listen how that happy nightingale

Tells with his hundred thousand new-found tongues

Over again the old attractive tale.

Yes, close your books; let schools and schoolmen be;

Only a little lazy book of songs

Snatch up, and take the long green road with me.

Men left behind us, like that fabled bird

Anca, that dwells in Caucasus alone,

Remote from footfall, secure from human word,

We ask no company except our own:

For we are deep in love with solitude,

And green-leaved peace, and woodland pondering—

Yes, even Love itself would here intrude.

Hafiz would be alone with the sweet spring,

Hafiz would be alone with his sweet song.

Of the immortal lonely ones is he anew,

Whom solitude and silence have made strong.

Therefore, he laughs at rivals such as you

Who think to match his inaccessible fame;

Yes, you remind him, poor presumptuous fools,

Of that rush-weaver of the olden time

Who to the shop of a great goldsmith came

And said: “I too an artist am—for tools

I also use, and keep a shop the same.”

Yes, you too keep your little shop of rhyme!

—-

Look at This Beauty

The beauty of this poem is beyond words.

Do you need a guide to experience the heat of the sun?

Blessed is the brush of the painter who paints

Such beautiful pictures for his virgin bride.

Look at this beauty. There is no reason for what you see.

Experience its grace. Even in nature there is nothing so fine.

Either this poem is a miracle, or some sort of magic trick.

Guided either by Gabriel or the Invisible Voice, inside.

No one, not even Hafiz, can describe with words the Great Mystery.

No one knows in which shell the priceless pearl does hide.

___________

Thanks For Visiting!

Gwyllm

(Mindscape II – Roberto Venosa)

A very short edition today….

Ah strange times… We were just about to launch Radio Free EarthRites spoken word… Arundhati Roy, Terence McKenna, Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, Allen Ginsberg, The Sacred Elixirs Conference, Jonathan Ott and others…

Now, we have to figure out how to raise the fiscals to pay for licensing. No license no radio.

If you believe that Earthrites, can make a difference, then help out if you can. If we got but 1.00 from all that visit Turfing in a day, we would be there.

Click on to Donate :

__________

The Link….

We Are The Internets…

__________

Our Friend Ron died yesterday, he was 43 years old. We will miss him, and his shy, gentle ways.

This is for you Ron.

Our death is our wedding with eternity.

What is the secret? “God is One.”

The sunlight splits when entering the windows of the house.

This multiplicity exists in the cluster of grapes;

It is not in the juice made from the grapes.

For he who is living in the Light of God,

The death of the carnal soul is a blessing.

Regarding him, say neither bad nor good,

For he is gone beyond the good and the bad.

Fix your eyes on God and do not talk about what is invisible,

So that he may place another look in your eyes.

It is in the vision of the physical eyes

That no invisible or secret thing exists.

But when the eye is turned toward the Light of God

What thing could remain hidden under such a Light?

Although all lights emanate from the Divine Light

Don’t call all these lights “the Light of God”;

It is the eternal light which is the Light of God,

The ephemeral light is an attribute of the body and the flesh.

…Oh God who gives the grace of vision!

The bird of vision is flying towards You with the wings of desire.

Rumi

________________

More Coming….

Peace be with you.

Gwyllm

So Lammas/Lugnasadh is upon us… The wheel turns and the Harvest is here:

We have ploughed, we have sowed,

We have reaped, we have mowed,

We have brought home every load,

Hip, hip, hip, Harvest Home!

Now Lammas comes in, our harvest begin,

We have done our endeavours to get the corn in;

We reap and we mow

And we stoutly blow

And cut down the corn

That did sweetly grow …

(anon)

———

A nice harvest of articles, poetry and links. A new poem from Laura Pendell…

enjoy,

Gwyllm

On The Menu:

Nightmare – Laura Pendell

The Links

LAMMAS: The First Harvest

Harvest: Poetry for Lammas/Lugnasadh…

________________

NIGHTMARE

This is not about the nightmare – you know it –

the one you wake up from. Shaking, maybe screaming.

This is not about finding yourself in the middle

of a sidewalk without your clothes on.

About finding yourself on a ladder

falling over backwards into an abyss.

Or running down a street because something

is chasing you and no matter where you turn it’s still there.

And then you wake up.

This is about the children of south Lebanon.

The children of Qana, Tyre, Gemmayzeh, Beirut.

About two families who took shelter

in an abandoned building on a hillside above Qana.

They did not have money to hire a car to take them north.

This is about two Israeli air strikes an hour after midnight.

It’s about cement and sand and how it filled the mouths

of 37 children and 15 adults

pulled from the wreckage dead

where they had sought safety for the night.

This is about children who now live, if they’re lucky,

in underground garages turned into shelters.

Or in abandoned buildings, if they’re not.

Some sprawled half asleep on pieces of foam.

A curly-headed toddler still in diapers, sucking her thumb,

her mattress covered with blue flannel sheets

printed in yellow with the sun, the stars and the moon.

The ones I see in Kids’ Catalogs that flood my mailbox.

Bush, Blair, Ehud Olmert,

Nasrallah of the Hezbollah.

What do they dream?

I dream of the eyes of Lebanon’s children

who are living a nightmare from which there is no waking.

A little boy staring out at a world of broken buildings.

I don’t even know if he has parents anymore.

We are awake together.

-For the children of Lebanon-

– Laura Pendell

________________________

The Links:

Taking High Culture Literally

Scientists say Erie mirage could be real

“My wife and children are injured, and we have nowhere to go.”

France’s new Stonehenge: Secrets of a neolithic time machine

____________

LAMMAS: The First Harvest

by Mike Nichols

It was upon a Lammas Night

When corn rigs are bonny,

Beneath the Moon’s unclouded light,

I held awhile to Annie…

Although in the heat of a Mid-western summer it might be difficult to discern, the festival of Lammas (Aug 1st) marks the end of summer and the beginning of fall. The days now grow visibly shorter and by the time we’ve reached autumn’s end (Oct 31st), we will have run the gammut of temperature from the heat of August to the cold and (sometimes) snow of November. And in the midst of it, a perfect Mid-western autumn.

The history of Lammas is as convoluted as all the rest of the old folk holidays. It is of course a cross-quarter day, one of the four High Holidays or Greater Sabbats of Witchcraft, occuring 1/4 of a year after Beltane. It’s true astrological point is 15 degrees Leo, but tradition has set August 1st as the day Lammas is typically celebrated. The celebration proper would begin on sundown of the previous evening, our July 31st, since the Celts reckon their days from sundown to sundown.

However, British Witches often refer to the astrological date of Aug 6th as Old Lammas, and folklorists call it Lammas O.S. (‘Old Style’). This date has long been considered a ‘power point’ of the Zodiac, and is symbolized by the Lion, one of the ‘tetramorph’ figures found on the Tarot cards, the World and the Wheel of Fortune (the other three figures being the Bull, the Eagle, and the Spirit). Astrologers know these four figures as the symbols of the four ‘fixed’ signs of the Zodiac, and these naturally allign with the four Great Sabbats of Witchcraft. Christians have adopted the same iconography to represent the four gospel-writers.

‘Lammas’ was the medieval Christian name for the holiday and it means ‘loaf-mass’, for this was the day on which loaves of bread were baked from the first grain harvest and laid on the church altars as offerings. It was a day representative of ‘first fruits’ and early harvest.

In Irish Gaelic, the feast was referred to as ‘Lugnasadh’, a feast to commemorate the funeral games of the Irish sun-god Lugh. However, there is some confusion on this point. Although at first glance, it may seem that we are celebrating the death of Lugh, the god of light does not really die (mythically) until the autumnal equinox. And indeed, if we read the Irish myths closer, we discover that it is not Lugh’s death that is being celebrated, but the funeral games which Lugh hosted to commemorate the death of his foster-mother, Taillte. That is why the Lugnasadh celebrations in Ireland are often called the ‘Tailltean Games’.

The time went by with careless heed

Between the late and early,

With small persuasion she agreed

To see me through the barley…

One common feature of the Games were the ‘Tailltean marriages’, a rather informal marriage that lasted for only ‘a year and a day’ or until next Lammas. At that time, the couple could decide to continue the arrangement if it pleased them, or to stand back to back and walk away from one another, thus bringing the Tailltean marriage to a formal close. Such trial marriages (obviously related to the Wiccan ‘Handfasting’) were quite common even into the 1500′s, although it was something one ‘didn’t bother the parish priest about’. Indeed, such ceremonies were usually solemnized by a poet, bard, or shanachie (or, it may be guessed, by a priest or priestess of the Old Religion).

Lammastide was also the traditional time of year for craft festivals. The medieval guilds would create elaborate displays of their wares, decorating their shops and themselves in bright colors and ribbons, marching in parades, and performing strange, ceremonial plays and dances for the entranced onlookers. The atmosphere must have been quite similar to our modern-day Renaissance Festivals, such as the one celebrated in near-by Bonner Springs, Kansas, each fall.

A ceremonial highlight of such festivals was the ‘Catherine wheel’. Although the Roman Church moved St. Catherine’s feast day all around the calender with bewildering frequency, it’s most popular date was Lammas. (They also kept trying to expel this much-loved saint from the ranks of the blessed because she was mythical rather than historical, and because her worship gave rise to the heretical sect known as the Cathari.) At any rate, a large wagon wheel was taken to the top of a near-by hill, covered with tar, set aflame, and ceremoniously rolled down the hill. Some mythologists see in this ritual the remnants of a Pagan rite symbolizing the end of summer, the flaming disk representing the sun-god in his decline. And just as the sun king has now reached the autumn of his years, his rival or dark self has just reached puberty.

Many comentators have bewailed the fact that traditional Gardnerian and Alexandrian Books of Shadows say very little about the holiday of Lammas, stating only that poles should be ridden and a circle dance performed. This seems strange, for Lammas is a holiday of rich mythic and cultural associations, providing endless resources for liturgical celebration.

Corn rigs and barley rigs,

Corn rigs are bonny!

I’ll not forget that happy night

Among the rigs with Annie!

[Verse quotations by Robert Burns, as handed down through several Books of Shadows.]

_________

Harvest: Poetry for Lammas/Lugnasadh…

_________

The Harvest Bow

As you plaited the harvest bow

You implicated the mellowed silence in you

In wheat that does not rust

But brightens as it tightens twist by twist

Into a knowable corona,

A throwaway love-knot of straw.

Hands that aged round ashplants and cane sticks

And lapped the spurs on a lifetime of game cocks

Harked to their gift and worked with fine intent

Until your fingers moved somnambulant:

I tell and finger it like braille,

Gleaning the unsaid off the palpable,

And if I spy into its golden loops

I see us walk between the railway slopes

Into an evening of long grass and midges,

Blue smoke straight up, old beds and ploughs in hedges,

An auction notice on an outhouse wall–

You with a harvest bow in your lapel,

Me with the fishing rod, already homesick

For the big lift of these evenings, as your stick

Whacking the tips off weeds and bushes

Beats out of time, and beats, but flushes

Nothing: that original townland

Still tongue-tied in the straw tied by your hand.

The end of art is peace

Could be the motto of this frail device

That I have pinned up on our deal dresser–

Like a drawn snare

Slipped lately by the spirit of the corn

Yet burnished by its passage, and still warm.

Seamus Heaney

—

It was on a Lammas night,

When corn rigs are bonie,

Beneath the moon’s unclouded light,

I held away to Annie:

The time flew by, wi tentless heed,

Till ‘tween the late and early;

Wi’ sma’ persuasion she agreed

To see me thro’ the barley.

The sky was blue, the wind was still,

The moon was shining clearly;

I set her down, wi’ right good will,

Amang the rigs o’barley

I ken’t her heart was a’ my ain;

I lov’d her most sincerely;

I kissed her owre and owre again,

Among the rig o’ barley.

I locked her in my fond embrace;

Her heart was beating rarely:

My blessings on that happy place,

Amang the rigs o’barley.

But by the moon and stars so bright,

That shone that hour so clearly!

She ay shall bless that happy night,

Amang the rigs o’barley.

I hae been blythe wi’ Comrades dear;

I hae been merry drinking;

I hae been joyfu’ gath’rin gear;

I hae been happy thinking:

But a’ the pleasures e’er I saw,

Tho three times doubl’d fairley

That happy night was worth then a’.

Among the rig’s o’ barley.

CHORUS

Corn rigs, an’ barley rigs,

An’ corn rigs are bonie:

I’ll ne’er forget that happy night,

Among the rigs wi’ Annie.

Robert Burns

—-

The Lammas Hireling

After the fair, I’d still a light heart

and a heavy purse, he struck so cheap.

And cattle doted on him: in his time

mine only dropped heifers, fat as cream.

Yields doubled. I grew fond of company

that knew when to shut up. Then one night,

disturbed from dreams of my dear late wife,

I hunted down her torn voice to his pale form.

Stock-still in the light from the dark lantern,

stark-naked but for one bloody boot of fox-trap,

I knew him a warlock, a cow with leather horns.

To go into the hare gets you muckle sorrow,

the wisdom runs, muckle care. I levelled

and blew the small hour through his heart.

The moon came out. By its yellow witness

I saw him fur over like a stone mossing.

His lovely head thinned. His top lip gathered.

His eyes rose like bread. I carried him

in a sack that grew lighter at every step

and dropped him from a bridge. There was no

splash. Now my herd’s elf-shot. I don’t dream

but spend my nights casting ball from half-crowns

and my days here. Bless me Father for I have sinned.

It has been an hour since my last confession.

Ian Duhig

—–

Corn Dolly

Watch her as she moves through golden waves

Where ears ripen beneath the summer sun

Now reapers move across the field, leaving swathes

Binders follow making sheaves; a harvest won

From the soil we have tilled.

Grain that in winter can be milled.

There’s a gentle swish of sickles through the stalk

John Barleycorn is falling to the ground

The rig moves on; girls exchanging daily talk

As carefully they bind each sheaf around

Sweating children work to stook

Where mothers have no time to look.

At eventide the sun falls below the dripping brow

Ceres’ row still stands against the blackthorn hedge

Her spirit to be beaten back where the oxen plough

When winter’s solstice comes they’ll make a pledge

Now its time for sing of joy and mirth

Celebrate the bounteous Mother Earth

Though the bedstraw beckons weary bairns for sleep

And dreams of bitter ales beckon to parched lips

At the centre of the field there’s still a sheaf to reap

The reapers face the stand with hands on hips

Each takes his turn to throw

His sickle at this final row.

To reap the clyack sheaf as custom now demands

Each man in turn the blindfold takes

Thrice times three is turned around by other hands

The sickle then cast forth to the fates

The victor knows from others’ cheer

He shall claim the flowing jug of beer

Rituals that have been passed down to us from ancient times

As these last stalks are gathered up with care

Straw woven with skilled hands to once forgotten rhymes

A neck dolly crafted by young Cerys the fair

‘Could this be Cybele, mother of gods ?’

Her grandmother raises her eyes and nods.

Neck dollies, drop dollies, Brigit’s and kirn child

Some dressed in gay ribbons, others in white

Thin bodies, full bodies, some pagan and wild

Carried home on the last of the wagons tonight

Tokens to hang on each farmhouse wall

To be raised in the spring, a spirit to call.

Under late summer sun sheaves are ripened and dried

The wagons are loaded until Baba remains

Rigs of reapers make circles whilst she is untied

Each takes a step forward and ears are claimed

There’s a bow to the centre from all around

Each reaper touching an ear to the ground.

When all have departed two strangers enter the field

Oat man and oat woman with a dance to perform

Beneath long purple cloaks their dolls are concealed

A grim reaper beheaded, a spirit to enter the corn

The rite of an old Phrygian sacrifice

Crying the neck to bring next year’s life.

David Hopcroft

New Show Is Now On!

A big thanks to Doug in London for fixing it.

Cheers, Gwyllm

The Radio… The Radio….

So, I worked on Mp3′s all day long Sunday…. Cleaning, Converting their speeds, listing them, arranging them, and uploading them. Then, I upload the new show list. Wonderful, all set. Well, then I found that the radio was down, after some 7 hours of work. Yikes! Now that was the day that was…

And This Just In! Congratulations to Chris and Vanessa!

Chris And Vanessa Elope!

On The Menu:

The Links…

Drugs That Shape Men’s Minds – Aldous Huxley

Poetry: Aldous Huxley

Art: Huxley “Door of Perception” Gwyllm Llwydd/Jealousy, Sporting Life, Blind Love all by Dodie…

This issue is dedicated to Aldous Huxley, with all of his myriad talents and insights. Maybe it is indeed time for an “Island”.

Bright Blessings,

Gwyllm

_______

The Links…

Fossil frogs yield ‘soft tissues’

Michael Moore says gets lots of Republican hugs

Tomato Face…!

Anger in the Arab World

Australian ‘Nessie’ fossils found

November Is Coming: Bush Bids for Sweeping Detention Power

______________

Drugs That Shape Men’s Minds – by Aldous Huxley

Essayist, satirist, critic, literary journalist and prolific novelist (Antic Hay, Point Counter Point, Brave New World, The Genius and the Goddess, and so on), Aldous Huxley had familial roots in the sciences. His grandfather was T.H. Huxley, famed English zoologist, and his brother is Sir Julian Huxley, contemporary biologist. Aldous Huxley’s interest in mind-changing drugs led him, some years ago, to become an experimental subject for research on the effects of mescaline and similar drugs. He wrote two books on this experience and its implications.

Saturday Evening Post, 18 October 1958

Copyright © 1958 by Aldous Huxley

In the course of history many more people have died for their drink and their dope than have died for their religion or their country. The craving for ethyl alcohol and the opiates has been stronger, in these millions, than the love of God, of home, of children; even of life. Their cry was not for liberty or death; it was for death preceded by enslavement. There is a paradox here, and a mystery. Why should such multitudes of men and women be so ready to sacrifice themselves for a cause so utterly hopeless and in ways so painful and so profoundly humiliating?

To this riddle there is, of course, no simple or single answer. Human beings are immensely complicated creatures, living simultaneously in a half dozen different worlds. Each individual is unique and, in a number of respects, unlike all the other members of the species. None of our motives is unmixed, none of our actions can be traced back to a single source and, in any group we care to study, behavior patterns that are observably similar may be the result of many constellations of dissimilar causes.

Thus, there are some alcoholics who seem to have been biochemically predestined to alcoholism (Among rats, as Prof. Roger Williams, of the University of Texas, has shown, some are born drunkards; some are born teetotalers and will never touch the stuff.) Other alcoholics have been foredoomed not by some inherited defect in their biochemical make-up, but by their neurotic reactions to distressing events in their childhood or adolescence. Again, others embark upon their course of slow suicide as a result of mere imitation and good fellowship because they have made such an “excellent adjustment to their group” – a process which, if the group happens to be criminal, idiotic or merely ignorant, can bring only disaster to the well-adjusted individual. Nor must we forget that large class of addicts who have taken to drugs or drink in order to escape from physical pain. Aspirin, let us remember, is a very recent invention. Until late in the Victorian era, “poppy and mandragora,” along with henbane and ethyl alcohol, were the only pain relievers available to civilized man. Toothache, arthritis and neuralgia could, and frequently did, drive men and women to become opium addicts.

De Quincey, for example, first resorted to opium in order to relieve “excruciating rheumatic pains of the head.” He swallowed his poppy and, an hour later, “What a resurrection from the lowest depths of the inner spirit! What an apocalypse!” And it was not merely that he felt no more pain. “This negative effect was swallowed up in the immensity of those positive effects which had opened up before me, in the abyss of divine enjoyment thus suddenly revealed…. Here was the secret of happiness. about which the philosophers had disputed for so many ages, at once discovered.”

“Resurrection. apocalypse, divine enjoyment. happiness. . . .” De Quincey’s words lead us to the very heart of our paradoxical mystery. The problem of drug addiction and excessive drinking is not merely a matter of chemistry and psychopathology, of relief from pain and conformity with a bad society. It is also a problem in metaphysics – a problem, one might almost say, in theology. In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James has touched on these metaphysical aspects of addiction:

The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties in human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates and says no. Drunkenness expands, unites and says yes. It is in fact the great exciter of the Yes function in man. It brings its votary from the chill periphery of things into the radiant core. It makes him for the moment one with truth. Not through mere perversity do men run after it. To the poor and the unlettered it stands in the place of symphony concerts and literature; and it is part of the deeper mystery and tragedy of life that whiffs and gleams of something that we immediately recognize as excellent should be vouchsafed to so many of us only through the fleeting earlier phases of what, in its totality, is so degrading a poison. The drunken consciousness is one bit of the mystic consciousness, and our total opinion of it must find its place in Our opinion of that larger whole.

William James was not the first to detect a likeness between drunkenness and the mystical and premystical states. On the day of Pentecost there were people who explained the strange behavior of the disciples by saying, “These men are full of new wine.

Peter soon undeceived them: “These are not drunken, as ye suppose, seeing it is but the third hour of the day. But this is that which was spoken by the prophet Joel. And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh.”

And it is not only by “the dry critics of the sober hour” that the state of God-intoxication has been likened to drunkenness. In their efforts to express the inexpressible, the great mystics themselves have done the same. Thus, St. Theresa of Avila tells us that she “regards the centre of our soul as a cellar, into which God admits us as and when it pleases Him, so as to intoxicate us with the delicious wine of His grace.”

Every fully developed religion exists simultaneously on several different levels. It exists as a set of abstract concepts about the world and its governance. It exists as a set of rites and sacraments, as a traditional method for manipulating the symbols, by means of which beliefs about the cosmic order are expressed. It exists as the feelings of love, fear and devotion evoked by this manipulation of symbols.

And finally it exists as a special kind of feeling or intuition – a sense of the oneness of all things in their divine principle, a realization (to use the language of Hindu theology) that “thou art That,” a mystical experience of what seems self-evidently to be union with God.

The ordinary waking consciousness is a very useful and, on most occasions, an indispensable state of mind; but it is by no means the only form of consciousness, nor in all circumstances the best. Insofar as he transcends his ordinary self and his ordinary mode of awareness, the mystic is able to enlarge his vision, to look more deeply into the unfathomable miracle of existence.

The mystical experience is doubly valuable, it is valuable because it gives the experiencer a better understanding of himself and the world and because it may help him to lead a less self-centered and more creative life.

In hell, a great religious poet has written, the punishment of the lost is to be “their sweating selves, but worse.” On earth we are not worse than we are: we are merely our sweating selves, period.

Alas, that is quite bad enough. We love ourselves to the point of idolatry, but we also intensely dislike ourselves – we find ourselves unutterably boring. Correlated with this distaste for the idolatrously worshiped self, there is in all of us a desire, sometimes latent, sometimes conscious and passionately expressed, to escape from the prison of our individuality, an urge to self-transcendence. It is to this urge that we owe mystical theology, spiritual exercises and yoga – to this, too, that we owe alcoholism and drug addiction.

Modern pharmacology has given us a host of new synthetics, but in the field of the naturally occurring mind changers it has made psychological methods of self-control preferable from every point of view to complacency imposed from without by the methods of chemical control.

And now let us consider the case – not, alas, a hypothetical case – of two societies competing with each other. In Society A, tranquilizers are available by prescription and at a rather stiff price which means, in practice, that their use is confined to that rich and influential minority which provides the society with its leadership. This minority of leading citizens consumes several billions of the complacency – producing pills every year. In Society B, on the other hand, the tranquilizers are not so freely available, and the members of the influential minority do not resort, on the slightest provocation, to the chemical control of what may be necessary and productive tension. Which of these two competing societies is likely to win the race? A society whose leaders make an excessive use of soothing syrups is in danger of failing behind a society whose leaders are not over-tranquilized.

Now let us consider another kind of drug – still undiscovered, but probably just around the corner – a drug capable of making people feel happy in situations where they would normally feel miserable. Such a drug would be a blessing, but a blessing fraught with grave political dangers. By making harmless chemical euphoria freely available, a dictator could reconcile an entire population to a state of affairs to which self-respecting human beings ought not to be reconciled. Despots have always found it necessary to supplement force by political or religious propaganda. In this sense the pen is mightier than the sword. But mightier than either the pen or the sword is the pill. In mental hospitals it has been found that chemical restraint is far more effective than strait jackets or psychiatry. The dictatorships of tomorrow will deprive men of their freedom, but will give them in exchange a happiness none the less real, as a subjective experience, for being chemically induced. The pursuit of happiness is one of the traditional rights of man; unfortunately, the achievement of happiness may turn out to be incompatible with another of man’s rights – liberty.

It is quite possible, however, that pharmacology will restore with one hand what it takes away with the other. Chemically induced euphoria could easily become a threat to individual liberty:, but chemically induced vigor and chemically heightened intelligence could easily be liberty’s strongest bulwark. Most of us function at about 15 per cent of capacity. How can we step up our lamentably low efficiency?

Two methods are available – the educational and the biochemical. We can take adults and children as they are and give them a much better training than we are giving them now. Or, by appropriate biochemical methods, we can transform them into superior individuals. If these superior individuals are given a superior education, the results will be revolutionary. They will be startling even if we continue to subject them to the rather poor educational methods at present in vogue.

Will it in fact be possible to produce superior individuals by biochemical means? The Russians certainly believe it. They are now halfway through a Five Year Plan to produce “pharmacological substances that normalize higher nervous activity and heighten human capacity for work.” Precursors of these future mind improvers are already being experimented with. It has been found, for example, that when given in massive doses some of the vitamins – nicotinic acid and ascorbic acid for example – sometimes produce a certain heightening of psychic energy. A combination of two enzymes – ethylene disulphonate and adenosine triphosphate, which, when injected together, improve carbohydrate metabolism in nervous tissue – may also turn out to be effective.

Meanwhile good results are being claimed for various new synthetic, nearly harmless stimulants. There is iproniazid, which, according to some authorities, “appears to increase the total amount of psychic energy.” Unfortunately, iproniazid in large doses has side effects which in some cases may be extremely serious! Another psychic energizer is an amino alcohol which is thought to increase the body’s production of acetylcholine, a substance of prime importance in the functioning of the nervous system. In view of what has already been achieved, it seems quite possible that, within a few years, we may be able to lift ourselves up by our own biochemical bootstraps.

in the meantime let us all fervently wish the Russians every success in their current pharmacological venture. The discovery of a drug capable of increasing the average individual’s psychic energy, and its wide distribution throughout the U.S.S.R., would probably mean the end of Russia’s present form of government. Generalized intelligence and mental alertness are the most powerful enemies of dictatorship and at the same time the basic conditions of effective democracy. Even in the democratic West we could do with a bit of psychic energizing. Between them, education and pharmacology may do something to offset the effects of that deterioration of our biological material to which geneticists have frequently called attention.

From these political and ethical considerations let us now pass to the strictly religious problems that will be posed by some of the new mind changers. We can foresee the nature of these future problems by studying the effects of a natural mind changer, which has been used for centuries past in religious worship; I refer to the peyote cactus of Northern Mexico and the Southwestern United States. Peyote contains mescaline – which can now be produced synthetically – and mescaline in William James’ phrase, “stimulates the mystical faculties in human nature” far more powerfully and in a far more enlightening way than alcohol and, what is more, it does so at a physiological and social cost that is negligibly low. Peyote produces self-transcendence in two ways – it introduces the taker into the Other World of visionary experience, and it gives him a sense of solidarity with his fellow worshipers, with human beings at large and with the divine nature of things.

The effects of peyote can be duplicated by synthetic mescaline and by LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide), a derivative of ergot. Effective in incredibly small doses, LSD is now being used experimentally by psychotherapists in Europe, in South America, in Canada and the United States. It lowers the barrier between conscious and subconscious and permits the patient to look more deeply and understandingly into the recesses of his own mind. The deepening of self-knowledge takes place against a background of visionary and even mystical experience.

When administered in the right kind of psychological environment, these chemical mind changers make possible a genuine religious experience. Thus a person who takes LSD or mescaline may suddenly understand not only intellectually but organically, experientially the meaning of such tremendous religious affirmations as “God is love,” or “Though he slay me, yet will I trust in Him.”

It goes without saying that this kind of temporary self-transcendence is no guarantee of permanent enlightenment or a lasting improvement of conduct. It is a “gratuitous grace,” which is neither necessary nor sufficient for salvation, but which if properly used, can be enormously helpful to those who have received it. And this is true of all such experiences, whether occurring spontaneously, or as the result of swallowing the right kind of chemical mind changer, or after undertaking a course of “spiritual exercises” or bodily mortification.

Those who are offended by the idea that the swallowing of a pill may contribute to a genuinely religious experience should remember that all the standard mortifications – fasting, voluntary sleeplessness and self-torture – inflicted upon themselves by the ascetics of every religion for the purpose of acquiring merit, are also, like the mind-changing drugs, powerful devices for altering the chemistry of the body in general and the nervous system in particular. Or consider the procedures generally known as spiritual exercises. The breathing techniques taught by the yogi of India result in prolonged suspensions of respiration. These in turn result in an increased concentration of carbon dioxide in the blood; and the psychological consequence of this is a change in the quality of consciousness. Again, meditations involving long, intense concentration upon it single idea or image may also result – for neurological reasons which I do not profess to understand – in a slowing down of respiration and even in prolonged suspensions of breathing.

Many ascetics and mystics have practiced their chemistry-changing mortifications and spiritual exercises while living, for longer or shorter periods, as hermits. Now, the life of a hermit, such as Saint Anthony, is a life in which there are very few external stimuli. But as Hebb, John Lilly and other experimental psychologists have recently shown in the laboratory, a person in a limited environment, which provides very few external stimuli, soon undergoes a change in the quality of his consciousness and may transcend his normal self to the point of hearing voices or seeing visions, often extremely unpleasant, like so many of Saint Anthony’s visions, but sometimes beatific.

That men and women can, by physical and chemical means, transcend themselves in a genuinely spiritual way is something which, to the squeamish idealist, seems rather shocking. But, after all, the drug or the physical exercise is not the cause of the spiritual experience; it is only its occasion.

Writing of William James’ experiments with nitrous oxide, Bergson has summed up the whole matter in a few lucid sentences. “The psychic disposition was there, potentially, only waiting a signal to express itself in action. It might have been evoked spiritually by an effort made on its own spiritual level. But it could just as well be brought about materially, by an inhibition of what inhibited it, by the removing of an obstacle; and this effect was the wholly negative one produced by the drug.” Where, for any reason, physical or moral, the psychological dispositions are unsatisfactory, the removal of obstacles by a drug or by ascetic practices will result in a negative rather than a positive spiritual experience. Such an infernal experience is extremely distressing, but may also be extremely salutary. There are plenty of people to whom a few hours in hell – the hell that they themselves have done so much to create – could do a world of good.

Physiologically costless, or nearly costless, stimulators of the mystical faculties are now making their appearance, and many kinds of them will soon be on the market. We can be quite sure that, as and when they become available, they will be extensively used. The urge to self-transcendence is so strong and so general that it cannot be otherwise. In the past, very few people have had spontaneous experiences of a premystical or fully mystical nature; still fewer have been willing to undergo the psychophysical disciplines which prepare an insulated individual for this kind of self-transcendence. The powerful but nearly costless mind changers of the future will change all this completely. Instead of being rare, premystical and mystical experiences will become common. What was once the spiritual privilege of the few will be made available to the many. For the ministers of the world’s organized religions, this will raise a number of unprecedented problems. For most people, religion has always been a matter of traditional symbols and of their own emotional, intellectual and ethical response to those symbols. To men and women who have had direct experience of self-trascendence into the mind’s Other World of vision and union with the nature of things, a religion of mere symbols is not likely to be very staisfying. The perusal of a page from even the most beautifully written cookbook is no substitute for the eating of dinner. We are exhorted to “taste and see that the Lord is good.”

In one way or another, the world’s ecclesiastical authorities will have to come to terms with the new mind changers. They may come to terms with them negatively, by refusing to have anything to do with them. In that case, a psychological phenomenon, potentially of great spiritual value, will manifest itself outside the pale of organized religion. On the other hand, they may choose to come to terms with the mind changers in some positive way – exactly how, I am not prepared to guess.

My own belief is that, though they may start by being something of an embarrassment, these new mind changers will tend in the long run to deepen the spiritual life of the communities in which they are available. That famous “revival of religion,” about which so many people have been talking for so long, will not come about as the result of evangelistic mass meetings or the television appearances of photogenic clergymen. It will come about as the result of biochemical discoveries that will make it possible for large numbers of men and women to achieve a radical self-transcendence and a deeper understanding of the nature of things. And this revival of religion will be at the same time a revolution. From being an activity mainly concerned with symbols, religion will be transformed into an activity concerned mainly with experience and intuition – an everyday mysticism underlying and giving significance to everyday rationality, everyday tasks and duties, everyday human relationships.

___________

Poetry: Aldous Huxley…

Seasons

Blood of the world, time stanchless flows;

The wound is mortal and is mine.

I act, but not to my design,

Choose, but ’twas ever fate that chose,

Would flee, but there are doors that close.

Winter has set its muddy sign

Without me and within. The rose

Dies also in my heart and no stars shine.

But nightingales call back the sun;

The doors are down and I can run,

Can laugh, for destiny is dead.

All springs are hoarded in the flowers;

Quick flow the intoxicating hours,

For wine as well as blood is red.

—

Excerpt from “Soles Occidere Et Redire Possunt”

Oh, how remote he walked along the street,

Jostling with other lumps of human meat!

He was so tired. The café doors invite.

Caverned within them, still lingers the night

In shadowy coolness, soothing the seared sight.

He sat there smoking, soulless and wholly crass,

Sunk to the eyes in the warm sodden morass

Of his own guts, wearily, wearily

Ruminating visions of mortality –

—

Perils of the Small Hours

When life burns low as the fire in the grate

And all the evening’s books are read,

I sit alone, save for the dead

And the lovers I have grown to hate.

But all at once the narrow gloom

Of hatred and despair expands

In tenderness: thought stretches hands

To welcome to the midnight room

Another presence: – a memory

Of how last year in the sunlit field,

Laughing, you suddenly revealed

Beauty in immortality.

For so it is; a gesture strips

Life bare of all its make-believe.

All unprepared we may receive

Our casual apocalypse.

Sheer beauty, then you seemed to stir

Unbodied soul; soul sleeps to-night,

And love comes, dimming spirit’s sight,

When body plays interpreter.

—

Complaint Of A Poet Manqué

We judge by appearance merely:

If I can’t think strangely, I can at least look queerly.

So I grew the hair so long on my head

That my mother wouldn’t know me,

Till a woman in a night-club said,

As I was passing by,

“Hullo, here comes Salome…”

I looked in the dirty gilt-edged glass,

And, oh Salome! there I was –

Positively jewelled, half a vampire,

With the soul in my eyes hanging dizzily

Like the gatherer of proverbial samphire

Over the brink of the crag of sense,

Looking down from perilous eminence

Into a gulf of window night.

And there’s straw in my tempestuous hair,

And I’m not a poet: but never despair!

I’ll madly live the poems I shall never write.

Beautiful cool cloudy day here in Portland…

Working on the Turf, A new website as well, and a radio show for this afternoon.8o)

We are continuing on the theme from yesterday… Folk Tales from Eastern Europe, and the lyrical poetry of Tim Buckley… The artwork is from the great Russian Illustrator, Ivan Bilibin…

Our day here is moving at a slow, but beautiful pace.

Have a brilliant one… Gwyllm

Links: Oddities

From The Hungarian-Slovenish:The Sun-Horse

Poetry: The Lyrical Works of Tim Buckley Part 2

Art Work:Ivan Bilibin (Work is from Vassilisa the Beautiful)

Ivan Yakovlevich Bilibin (Иван Яковлевич Билибин) (August 16, 1876-February 7, 1942) was one of the most influential 20th-century illustrators and stage designers who took part in the Mir iskusstva and contributed to the Ballets Russes. Throughout his career, he was strongly inspired by Slavic folklore.

Ivan Bilibin was born in a suburb of St. Petersburg. He studied under Ilya Repin and furthered his education in Munich. In 1902-1904 Bilibin travelled in the Russian North, where he became fascinated with old wooden architecture and Russian folklore. He published his findings in the monograph Folk Arts of the Russian North in 1904. Another major influence on his art was traditional Japanese prints.

Bilibin gained renown in 1899, when he released his innovative illustrations of Russian fairy tales. During the Russian Revolution of 1905, he executed revolutionary cartoons. The October Revolution, however, proved alien to him. After brief stints in Cairo and Alexandria, he settled in Paris in 1925. There he took to decorating private mansions and Orthodox churches. He still longed for his homeland and, after decorating the Soviet Embassy in 1936, he returned to Soviet Russia. He delivered lectures in the Soviet Academy of Arts until 1941. Bilibin died during the Siege of Leningrad.

_____________

Links: Oddities

Bighouse Barbie…

Chillin’ Gumballs…!

Weird Children Recreational Parks

Girls Gone Border Patrol!

__________________

From The Hungarian-Slovenish:The Sun-Horse

THERE was once upon a time a country, sad and gloomy as the grave, on which God’s sun never shone. But there was a king there, and this king possessed a horse with a sun on his forehead; and this sun-horse of his the king caused to be led up and down the dark country, from one end to the other, that the people might be able to exist there; and light came from him on all sides wherever he was led, just as in the most beautiful day.

All at once the sun-horse disappeared. A darkness worse than that of night prevailed over the whole country, and nothing could disperse it. Unheard-of terror spread among the subjects; frightful misery began to afflict them, for they could neither manufacture anything nor earn anything, and such confusion arose among them that everything was turned topsy-turvy. The king, therefore, in order to liberate his realm and prevent universal destruction, made ready to seek the sun-horse with his whole army.

Through thick darkness he made his way as best he could to the frontier of his realm. Over dense mountains thousands of ages old God’s light began now to break from another country, as if the sun were rising in the morning out of thick fogs. On such a mountain the king came with his army to a poor lonely cottage. He went in to inquire where he was, what it was, and how to get further. At a table sat a peasant, diligently reading in an open book. When the king bowed to him he raised his eyes, thanked him, and stood up. His whole person announced that he was not a man like another man, but a seer.

‘I was just reading about you,’ said he to the king, ‘how that you are going to seek the sun-horse. Journey no further, for you will not obtain him; but rely on me: I will find him for you.’ ‘I promise you, good man, I will recompense you royally,’ replied the king, ‘if you bring him here to me.’ ‘I require no recompense; return home with your army–you’re wanted there; only leave me one servant.’

The next day the seer set out with the servant. The way was far and long, for they passed through six countries, and had still further to go, till in the seventh country they stopped at the royal palace. In this seventh country ruled three own brothers, who had to wife three own sisters, whose mother was a witch. When they stopped in front of the palace, the seer said to his servant: ‘Do you hear? you stay here, and I will go in to ascertain whether the kings are at home; for the horse with the sun is in their possession–the youngest rides upon him.’ Therewith he transformed himself into a green bird, and, flying on the gable of the eldest queen’s roof, flew up and down and pecked at it until she opened the window and let him into her chamber. And when she let him in he perched on her white hand, and the queen was as delighted with him as a little child. ‘Ah, what a dear creature you are!’ said she, as she played with him; ‘if my husband were at home he would indeed be delighted with you; but he won’t come till evening; he has gone to visit the third part of his country.’

All at once the old witch came into the room, and, seeing the bird, screamed to her daughter, ‘Wring the accursed bird’s neck, for it’s making you bleed!’ ‘Well, what if it should make me bleed? it’s such a dear; it’s such an innocent dear!’ answered the daughter. But the witch said: ‘Dear innocent mischief! here with him! let me wring his neck!’ and dashed at it. But the bird cunningly transformed itself into a man, and, pop! out through the door, and they didn’t know whither he had betaken himself.

Afterwards he again transformed himself into a green bird, flew on the gable of the middle sister, and pecked at it till she opened the window for him. And when she let him in he flew on to her white hand, and fluttered from one hand to the other. ‘Oh, what a dear creature you are!’ cried the queen, smiling; ‘my husband would indeed be delighted with you if he were at home; but he won’t come till to-morrow evening; he has gone to visit two thirds of his kingdom.’

Thereupon the witch burst into the room. ‘Wring the accursed bird’s neck! wring its neck, for it’s making you bleed!’ cried she as soon as she espied it. ‘Well, what if it should make me bleed? it’s such a dear, such an innocent dear!’ replied the daughter. But the witch said: ‘Dear innocent mischief! here with it! let me wring its neck!’ and was already trying to seize it. But at that moment the green bird changed itself into a man, ran out through the door, and disappeared, as it were, in the clap of a hand, so that they didn’t know whither he had gone.

A little while afterwards he changed himself again into a green bird and flew on the gable of the youngest queen’s roof, and flew up and down, and pecked at it until she opened the window to him. And when she had let him in he flew straight on to her white hand, and made himself so agreeable to her that she played with him with the delight of a child. ‘Ah, what a dear creature you are!’ said the queen; ‘if my husband were at home he would certainly be delighted with you, but he won’t come till the day after to-morrow at even; he has gone to visit all three parts of his kingdom.’

At that moment the old witch came into the room. ‘Wring, wring the accursed bird’s neck!’ screamed she in the doorway, ‘for it is making you bleed.’ ‘Well, what if it should make me bleed, mother? it is so beautiful, so innocent,’ answered the daughter. The witch said, ‘Beautiful innocent mischief! here with him! let me wring his neck!’ But at that moment the bird changed itself into a man, and pop! out through the door, so that none of them saw him more.

Now the seer knew where the kings were, and when they would arrive. He went to his servant and ordered him to follow him out of the town. On they went with rapid step till they came to a bridge, over which the kings were obliged to pass.

Under this bridge they stayed waiting till the evening. When at even the sun was sinking behind the mountains, the clatter of a horse was heard near the bridge. It was the eldest king returning home. Close to the bridge his horse stumbled over a log of wood, which the seer had thrown across the bridge. ‘Ha! what scoundrel was that who threw this log across the road?’ exclaimed the king in anger. Thereat the seer sprang out from under the bridge and rushed upon the king for ‘daring to call him a scoundrel,’ and, drawing his sword, attacked him. The king, too, drew his sword to defend himself, but after a short combat fell dead from his horse. The seer bound the dead king on the horse, and gave the horse a lash with the whip to make him carry his dead master home. He then withdrew under the bridge, and they waited there till the next evening.

When day a second time declined towards evening, the middle king came to the bridge, and, seeing the ground sprinkled with blood, cried out, ‘Somebody’s been killed here! Who has dared to perpetrate such a crime in my kingdom?’ At these words the seer sprang out from under the bridge and rushed upon the king with drawn sword, exclaiming, ‘How dare you insult me? Defend yourself as best you can!’ The king did defend himself, but after a brief struggle yielded up his life under the sword of the seer. The seer again fastened his corpse upon the horse, and gave the horse a lash with the whip to make him carry his dead master home. They then withdrew under the bridge and waited till the third evening came.

The third evening, at the very setting of the sun, up darted the youngest king on the sun-horse, darted up with speed, for he was somewhat late; but when he saw the red blood in front of the bridge, he stopped, and gazing at it exclaimed, ‘It is an unheard-of villain who has dared to murder a man in my kingdom!’ Scarcely had these words issued from his mouth when the seer placed himself before him with drawn sword, sternly bidding him defend himself, ‘for he had wounded his honour.’ ‘I don’t know how,’ answered the king, ‘unless it is you that are the villain.’ But as his adversary attacked him with a sword, he, too, drew his, and defended himself manfully.

It had been mere play to the seer to overcome the first two kings, but it was not so with this one. Long time they fought, and broke their swords, yet victory didn’t show itself either on the one side or on the other. ‘We shall effect nothing with swords,’ said the seer, ‘but do you know what? Let us turn ourselves into wheels and start down from the hill; the wheel which breaks shall be the conquered.’ ‘Good!’ said the king; ‘I’ll be a cart-wheel, and you shall be a lighter wheel.’ ‘Not so,’ cunningly said the seer; ‘you shall be the lighter wheel, and I will be the cart-wheel;’ and the king agreed to it. Then they went up the hill, turned themselves into wheels, and started downwards. The cart-wheel flew to pieces, and bang! right into the lighter wheel, so that it all smashed up. Immediately the seer arose out of the cart-wheel and joyfully exclaimed, ‘There you are, the victory is mine!’ ‘Not a bit of it, sir brother!’ cried the king, placing himself in front of the seer; ‘you have only broken my fingers. But do you know what? Let us make ourselves into flames, and the flame which burns up the other shall be the victor. I will make myself into a red flame, and do you make yourself into a bluish one.’ ‘Not so!’ interrupted the seer; ‘you make yourself into a bluish flame, and I will make myself into a red one.’ The king agreed to this also. They went into the road to the bridge, and, changing themselves into flames, began to burn each other unmercifully. Long did they burn each other, but nothing came of it. Thereupon, by coincidence, up came an old beggar with a long gray beard, a bald head, a large scrip at his side, leaning upon a thick staff. ‘Old father!’ said the bluish flame, ‘bring some water and quench this red flame; I’ll give you a penny for it.’ The red flame cunningly exclaimed, ‘Old father! I’ll give you a shilling if you’ll pour the water on this bluish flame.’ The old beggar liked the shilling better than the penny, brought water and quenched the bluish flame. Then it was all over with the king. The red flame turned itself into a man, took the sun-horse by the bridle, mounted on his back, called the servant, thanked the beggar for the service he had rendered, and went off.

In the royal palaces there was deep grief at the murder of the two kings; the entire palaces were draped with black cloth, and the people crowded into them from all quarters to gaze at the cut and slashed bodies of the two elder brothers, whose horses had brought them home. The old witch, exasperated at the death of her sons-in-law, devised a plan of vengeance on their murderer, the seer. She seated herself with speed on an iron rake, took her three daughters under her arms, and pop! off with them into the air.

The seer and his servant had already got through a good part of their journey, and were then crossing desert mountains, a treeless waste. Here a terrible hunger seized the servant, and there wasn’t even a wild plum to assuage it. All of a sudden they came to an apple-tree. Apples were hanging on it; the branches were all but breaking under their weight; their scent was beautiful; they were delightfully ruddy, so that they almost offered themselves to be eaten. ‘Praise be to God!’ cried the delighted servant; ‘I shall eat one of those apples with an excellent appetite.’ ‘Don’t attempt to gather one of them!’ cried the seer to him; ‘wait, I’ll gather some for you myself.’ But instead of plucking an apple, he drew his sword and thrust it mightily into the apple-tree; red blood spouted out of it. ‘There,’ said he, ‘you would have come to harm if you had eaten any of those apples, for the apple-tree was the eldest queen, whose mother placed her there to put us out of this world.’

After a time they came to a spring; water clear as crystal bubbled up in it, all but running over the brim and thus attracting wayfarers. ‘Ah!’ said the servant, ‘if we can’t get anything better, let us at any rate have a drink of this good water.’ ‘Don’t venture to drink of it!’ shouted the seer; ‘but stay, I’ll get you some of it.’ Yet he didn’t get him any water, but thrust his drawn sword into the midst of it; it was immediately discoloured with blood, which began to flow from it in mighty waves. ‘That is the middle queen, whose mother placed her here to put us out of this world,’ said the seer, and the servant thanked him for his warning, and went on, would he, nould he, in hunger and thirst, whithersoever the seer led him.

After a time they came to a rose-bush, which was red with delightful roses, and filled the air round about with their scent. ‘Oh, what beautiful roses!’ said the servant; ‘I never saw such beauties in all my life. I’ll go and gather a few of them; I will at any rate comfort myself with them if I can’t assuage my hunger and thirst.’ ‘Don’t venture to gather one of them!’ cried the seer; ‘I will gather them for you.’ With that he cut into the bush with his sword; red blood spurted out, as if he had cut the vein of a human being. ‘That is the youngest queen,’ said the seer to his servant, ‘whom her mother, the witch, placed here with the intention of taking vengeance upon us for the death of her sons-in-law.’ They then went on.

When they crossed the frontier of the dark realm, flashes flew in all directions from the horse’s forehead, and everything came to life again, beautiful regions rejoiced and blossomed with the flowers of spring. The king didn’t know how to thank the seer sufficiently, and offered him the half of his kingdom as a reward, but he declined it. You are king,’ said he; ‘rule over the whole realm, and I will return to my cottage in peace.’ He took leave and departed.

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Poetry: The Lyrical Works of Tim Buckley Part 2

I Woke Up

Now the sun sits on my hand

O where are you ?

Walking the wind I fly above the shore of the town

To the hills where I can hear

The harbor bells ring slavery

Where the fortune teller sighs to me

O I see your woman in the raw

Ride a mare of stone and howl

I woke up

While morning built

The world with light,

Crossing their hearts,

Twelve sailor boys all stood in a ring

Round our bed,

And from the grass a dancer rose,

Shivering,

Oh the sailors pointing

Out to sea

And the dancer diving

Up the sky

‘Til we forgot the day

—

Dolphins

Sometimes I think about Saturday’s child

And all about the times when we were running wild

I’ve been out searching for the dolphins in the sea

Ah, but sometimes I wonder, do you ever think of me

This old world will never change the way it’s been

And all the ways of war won’t change it back again

I’ve been out searchin’ for the dolphin in the sea

Ah, but sometimes I wonder, do you ever think of me

This old world will never change

—

Song of the Magician

When I sing I can’t bring everything on the wing

Flying down from dizzy air

To the ground because I care

You will be love and your love will live

When I smile I beguile all the while every mile

As I walk across the sky

Of the clockwork of your eye

You will be love and your love will live

Casting spells from the well I can tell you the bells

listen to my magic voice

Learn the tune of children’s toys

You will be love and your love will live

When I die do not cry hear my sigh passing by

After I have turned to win

I will try to help you then

You will be love and your love will live

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