Gwyllm.com

I would like to thank Robert Venosa for giving me the idea for this entry. He mentioned a new book that he had obtained recently of Orientalist Art: The Orientalists’ by Kristian Davies (Laynfaroh, NY). I am looking forward to finding a copy!

I have always had an abiding interest in the Middle East, yet regretfully when I had the chance I wandered elsewhere. Maybe soon I hope. I honestly have always wanted to see Babylon, and Ur as well as Persopolis…

Anyway, I would think that you will find the story is quite nice, the 3rd in the Arabian Tales Series (1001 Nights). The Poets are nothing short of wonderful as well.

I hope you enjoy,

Gwyllm

On the Menu:

One Story:The Tale Of The Ensorceled Prince

Poetry: Three Poets From Iraq

Orientalist Paintings…

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From The Arabian Tales: The Tale Of The Ensorceled Prince (Trans Sir Richard Burton)

Know then, O my lord, that whilom my sire was King of this city, and his name was Mahmud, entitled Lord of the Black Islands, and owner of what are now these four mountains. He ruled threescore and ten years, after which he went to the mercy of the Lord and I reigned as Sultan in his stead. I took to wife my cousin, the daughter of my paternal uncle, and she loved me with such abounding love that whenever I was absent she ate not and she drank not until she saw me again. She cohabited with me for five years till a certain day when she went forth to the hammam bath, and I bade the cook hasten to get ready all requisites for our supper. And I entered this palace and lay down on the bed where I was wont to sleep and bade two damsels to fan my face, one sitting by my head and the other at my feet.

But I was troubled and made restless by my wife’s absence and could not sleep, for although my eyes were closed, my mind and thoughts were wide-awake. Presently I heard the slave girl at my head say to her at my feet: “O Mas’udah, how miserable is our master and how wasted in his youth, and oh! the pity of his being so betrayed by our mistress, the accursed whore!” The other replied: “Yes indeed. Allah curse all faithless women and adulterous! But the like of our master, with his fair gifts, deserveth something better than this harlot who lieth abroad every night.” Then quoth she who sat by my head, “Is our lord dumb or fit only for bubbling that he questioneth her not!” and quoth the other: “Fie on thee! Doth our lord know her ways, or doth she allow him his choice? Nay, more, doth she not drug every night the cup she giveth him to drink before sleeptime, and put bhang into it? So he sleepeth and wotteth not whither she goeth, nor what she doeth, but we know that after giving him the drugged wine, she donneth her richest raiment and perfumeth herself and then she fareth out from him to be away till break of day. Then she cometh to him and burneth a pastille under his nose and he awaketh from his death-like sleep.” When I heard the slave girls’ words, the light became black before my sight and I thought night would never fall.

Presently the daughter of my uncle came from the baths, and they set the table for us and we ate and sat together a fair half-hour quaffing our wine, as was ever our wont. Then she called for the particular wine I used to drink before sleeping and reached me the cup, but, seeming to drink it according to my wont, I poured the contents into my bosom and, lying down, let her hear that I was asleep. Then, behold, she cried: “Sleep out the night, and never wake again! By Allah, I loathe thee and I loathe thy whole body, and my soul turneth in disgust from cohabiting with thee, and I see not the moment when Allah shall snatch away thy life!” Then she rose and donned her fairest dress and perfumed her person and slung my sword over her shoulder, and opening the gates of the palace, went her ill way.

I rose and followed her as she left the palace and she threaded the streets until she came to the city gate, where she spoke words I understood not and the padlocks dropped of themselves as if broken and the gate leaves opened. She went forth (and I after her without her noticing aught) till she came at last to the outlying mounds and a reed fence built about a round-roofed hut of mud bricks. As she entered the door, I climbed upon the roof, which commanded a view of the interior, And lo! my fair cousin had gone in to a hideous Negro slave with his upper lip like the cover of a pot and his lower like an open pot, lips which might sweep up sand from the gravel floor of the cot. He was to boot a leper and a paralytic, lying upon a strew of sugar-cane trash and wrapped in an old blanket and the foulest rags and tatters.

She kissed the earth before him, and he raised his head so as to see her and said: “Woe to thee! What call hadst thou to stay away all this time? Here have been with me sundry of the black brethren, who drank their wine and each had his young lady, and I was not content to drink because of thine absence.” Then she: “O my lord, my heart’s love and coolth of my eyes, knowest thou not that I am married to my cousin, whose very look I loathe, and hate myself when in his company? And did not I fear for thy sake, I would not let a single sun arise before making his city a ruined heap wherein raven should croak and howlet hoot, and jackal and wolf harbor and loot- nay, I had removed its very stones to the back side of Mount Kaf.” Rejoined the slave: “Thou liest, damn thee! Now I swear an oath by the valor and honor of blackamoor men (and deem not our manliness to be the poor manliness of white men), from today forth if thou stay away till this hour, I will not keep company with thee nor will I glue my body with thy body. Dost play fast and loose with us, thou cracked pot, that we may satisfy thy dirty lusts, O vilest of the vile whites?”

When I heard his words, and saw with my own eyes what passed between these two wretches, the world waxed dark before my face and my soul knew not in what place it was. But my wife humbly stood up weeping before and wheedling the slave, and saying: “O my beloved, and very fruit of my heart, there is none left to cheer me but thy dear self, and, if thou cast me off, who shall take me in, O my beloved, O light of my eyes?” And she ceased not weeping and abasing herself to him until he deigned be reconciled with her. Then was she right glad and stood up and doffed her clothes, even to her petticoat trousers, and said, “O my master, what hast thou here for thy handmaiden to eat?” “Uncover the basin,” he grumbled, “and thou shalt find at the bottom the broiled bones of some rats we dined on. Pick at them, and then go to that slop pot, where thou shalt find some leavings of beer which thou mayest drink.” So she ate and drank and washed her hands, and went and lay down by the side of the slave upon the cane trash and crept in with him under his foul coverlet and his rags and tatters.

When I saw my wife, my cousin, the daughter of my uncle, do this deed, I clean lost my wits, and climbing down from the roof, I entered and took the sword which she had with her and drew it, determined to cut down the twain. I first struck at the slave’s neck and thought that the death decree had fallen on him, for he groaned a loud hissing groan, but I had cut only the skin and flesh of the gullet and the two arteries! It awoke the daughter of my uncle, so I sheathed the sword and fared forth for the city, and entering the palace, lay upon my bed and slept till morning, when my wife aroused me and I saw that she had cut off her hair and had donned mourning garments. Quoth she: “O son of my uncle, blame me not for what I do. It hath just reached me that my mother is dead and my father hath been killed in holy war, and of my brothers one hath lost his life by a snake sting and the other by falling down some precipice, and I can and should do naught save weep and lament.”

When I heard her words I refrained from all reproach and said only: “Do as thou list. I certainly will not thwart thee.” She continued sorrowing, weeping and wailing one whole year from the beginning of its circle to the end, and when it was finished she said to me: “I wish to build me in thy palace a tomb with a cupola, which I will set apart for my mourning and will name the House of Lamentations.” Quoth I again: “Do as thou list!” Then she builded for herself a cenotaph wherein to mourn, and set on its center a dome under which showed a tomb like a santon’s sepulcher. Thither she carried the slave and lodged him, but he was exceeding weak by reason of his wound, and unable to do her love service. He could only drink wine, and from the day of his hurt he spake not a word, yet he lived on because his appointed hour was not come. Every day, morning and evening, my wife went to him and wept and wailed over him and gave him wine and strong soups, and left not off doing after this manner a second year. And I bore with her patiently and paid no heed to her.

One day, however, I went in to her unawares, and I found her weeping and beating her face and crying: “Why art thou absent from my sight, O my heart’s delight? Speak to me, O my life, talk with me, O my love.” When she had ended for a time her words and her weeping I said to her, “O my cousin, let this thy mourning suffice, for in pouring forth tears there is little profit!” “Thwart me not,” answered she, “in aught I do, or I will lay violent hands on myself!” So I held my peace and left her to go her own way, and she ceased not to cry and keen and indulge her affliction for yet another year. At the end of the third year I waxed aweary of this longsome mourning, and one day I happened to enter the cenotaph when vexed and angry with some matter which had thwarted me, and suddenly I heard her say: “O my lord, I never hear thee vouchsafe a single word to me! Why dost thou not answer me, O my master?” and she began reciting:

“O thou tomb! O thou tomb! Be his beauty set in shade?

Hast thou darkened that countenance all-sheeny as the noon?

O thou tomb! Neither earth nor yet Heaven art to me,

Then how cometh it in thee are conjoined my sun and moon?”

When I heard such verses as these rage was heaped upon my rage, I cried out: “Wellaway! How long is this sorrow to last?” and I began repeating:

“O thou tomb! O thou tomb! Be his horrors set in blight?

Hast thou darkened his countenance that sickeneth the soul?

O thou tomb! Neither cesspool nor pigskin art to me,

Then how cometh it in thee are conjoined soil and coal?”

When she heard my words she sprang to her feet crying: “Fie upon thee, thou cur! All this is of thy doings. Thou hast wounded my heart’s darling and thereby worked me sore woe, and thou hast wasted his youth so that these three years he hath lain abed more dead than alive!” In my wrath I cried: “O thou foulest of harlots and filthiest of whores ever futtered by Negro slaves who are hired to have at thee! Yes, indeed it was I who did this good deed.” And snatching up my sword, I drew it and made at her to cut her down. But she laughed my words and mine intent to scorn, crying: “To heel, hound that thou art! Alas for the past which shall no more come to pass, nor shall anyone avail the dead to raise. Allah hath indeed now given into my hand him who did to me this thing, a deed that hath burned my heart with a fire which died not a flame which might not be quenched!”

Then she stood up, and pronouncing some words to me unintelligible, she said, “By virtue of my egromancy become thou half stone and half man!” Whereupon I became what thou seest, unable to rise or to sit, and neither dead nor alive. Moreover, she ensorceled the city with all its streets and garths, and she turned by her gramarye the four islands into four mountains around the tarn whereof thou questionest me. And the citizens, who were of four different faiths, Moslem, Nazarene, Jew, and Magian, she transformed by her enchantments into fishes. The Moslems are the white, the Magians red, the Christians blue, and the Jews yellow. And every day she tortureth me and scourgeth me with a hundred stripes, each of which draweth floods of blood and cutteth the skin of my shoulders to strips. And lastly she clotheth my upper half with a haircloth and then throweth over them these robes. Hereupon the young man again shed tears and began reciting:

“In patience, O my God, I endure my lot and fate,

I will bear at will of Thee whatsoever be my state.

They oppress me, they torture me, they make my life a woe,

Yet haply Heaven’s happiness shall compensate my strait.

Yea, straitened is my life by the bane and hate o’ foes,

But Mustafa and Murtaza shall ope me Heaven’s gate.”

After this the Sultan turned toward the young Prince and said: “O youth, thou hast removed one grief only to add another grief. But now, O my friend, where is she, and where is the mausoleum wherein lieth the wounded slave?” “The slave lieth under yon dome,” quoth the young man, “and she sitteth in the chamber fronting yonder door. And every day at sunrise she cometh forth, and first strippeth me, and whippeth me with a hundred strokes of the leathern scourge, and I weep and shriek, but there is no power of motion in my lower limbs to keep her off me. After ending her tormenting me she visiteth the slave, bringing him wine and boiled meats. And tomorrow at an early hour she will be here.” Quoth the King: “By Allah, O youth, I will assuredly do thee a good deed which the world shall not willingly let die, and an act of derring-do which shall be chronicled long after I am dead and gone by.”

Then the King sat him by the side of the young Prince and talked till nightfall, when he lay down and slept. But as soon as the false dawn showed, he arose and, doffing his outer garments, bared his blade and hastened to the place wherein lay the slave. Then was he ware of lighted candles and lamps, and the perfume of incenses and unguents, and directed by these, he made for the slave and struck him one stroke, killing him on the spot. After which he lifted him on his back and threw him into a well that was in the palace. Presently he returned and, donning the slave’s gear, lay down at length within the mausoleum with the drawn sword laid close to and along his side. After an hour or so the accursed witch came, and first going to her husband, she stripped off his clothes and, taking a whip, flogged him cruelly while he cried out: “Ah! Enough for me the case I am in! Take pity on me, O my cousin!” But she replied, “Didst thou take pity on me and spare the life of my truelove on whom I doated?”

Then she drew the cilice over his raw and bleeding skin and threw the robe upon all and went down to the slave with a goblet of wine and a bowl of meat broth in her hands. She entered under the dome weeping and wailing, “Wellaway!” and crying: “O my lord! Speak a word to me! O my master! Talk awhile with me!” and began to recite these couplets:

“How long this harshness, this unlove, shall bide?

Suffice thee not tear floods thou hast espied?

Thou dost prolong our parting purposely

And if wouldst please my foe, thou’rt satisfied!”

Then she wept again and said: “O my lord! Speak to me, talk with me!” The King lowered his voice and, twisting his tongue, spoke after the fashion of the blackamoors and said “‘Lack, ‘lack! There be no Majesty and there be no Might save in Allauh, the Gloriose, the Great!”

Now when she heard these words she shouted for joy, and fell to the ground fainting, and when her senses returned she asked, “O my lord, can it be true that thou hast power of speech?” And the King, making his voice small and faint, answered: “O my cuss! Dost thou deserve that I talk to thee and speak with thee?” “Why and wherefore?” rejoined she, and he replied: “The why is that all the livelong day thou tormentest thy hubby, and he keeps calling on ‘eaven for aid until sleep is strange to me even from evenin’ till mawnin’, and he prays and damns, cussing us two, me and thee, causing me disquiet and much bother. Were this not so, I should long ago have got my health, and it is this which prevents my answering thee.” Quoth she, “With thy leave I will release him from what spell is on him,” and quoth the King, “Release him, and let’s have some rest!” She cried, “To hear is to obey,” and, going from the cenotaph to the palace, she took a metal bowl and filled it with water and spake over it certain words which made the contents bubble and boil as a caldron seetheth over the fire. With this she sprinkled her husband saying, “By virtue of the dread words I have spoken, if thou becamest thus by my spells, come forth out of that form into thine own former form.”

And lo and behold! the young man shook and trembled, then he rose to his feet and, rejoicing at his deliverance, cried aloud, “I testify that there is no god but the God, and in very truth Mohammed is His Apostle, whom Allah bless and keep!” Then she said to him, “Go forth and return not hither, for if thou do I will surely slay thee,” screaming these words in his face. So he went from between her hands, and she returned to the dome and, going down to the sepulcher, she said, “O my lord, come forth to me that I may look upon thee and thy goodliness!” The King replied in faint low words: “What thing hast thou done? Thou hast rid me of the branch, but not of the root.” She asked: “O my darling! O my Negroling! What is the root?” And he answered: “Fie on thee, O my cuss! The people of this city and of the four islands every night when it’s half-passed lift their heads from the tank in which thou hast turned them to fishes and cry to Heaven and call down its anger on me and thee, and this is the reason why my body’s balked from health. Go at once and set them free, then come to me and take my hand, and raise me up, for a little strength is already back in me.”

When she heard the King’s words (and she still supposed him to be the slave) she cried joyously: “O my master, on my head and on my eyes be thy command. Bismillah!” So she sprang to her feet and, full of joy and gladness, ran down to the tarn and took a little of its water in the palm of her hand and spake over it words not to be understood, and the fishes lifted their heads and stood up on the instant like men, the spell on the people of the city having been removed. What was the lake again became a crowded capital. The bazaars were thronged with folk who bought and sold, each citizen was occupied with his own calling, and the four hills became islands as they were whilom.

Then the young woman, that wicked sorceress, returned to the King and (still thinking he was the Negro) said to him: “O my love! Stretch forth thy honored hand that I may assist thee to rise.” “Nearer to me,” quoth the King in a faint and feigned tone. She came close as to embrace him, when he took up the sword lying hid by his side and smote her across the breast, so that the point showed gleaming behind her back. Then he smote her a second time and cut her in twain and cast her to the ground in two halves. After which he fared forth and found the young man, now freed from the spell, awaiting him and gave him joy of his happy release while the Prince kissed his hand with abundant thanks.

Quoth the King, “Wilt thou abide in this city, or go with me to my capital?” Quoth the youth, “O King of the Age, wettest thou not what journey is between thee and thy city?” “Two days and a half,” answered he, whereupon said the other: “An thou be sleeping, O King, awake! Between thee and thy city is a year’s march for a well-girt walker, and thou haddest not come hither in two days and a half save that the city was under enchantment. And I, O King, will never part from thee- no, not even for the twinkling of an eye.” The King rejoiced at his words and said: “Thanks be to Allah, Who hath bestowed thee upon me! From this hour thou art my son and my only son, for that in all my life I have never been blessed with issue.” Thereupon they embraced and joyed with exceeding great joy. And, reaching the palace, the Prince who had been spellbound informed his lords and his grandees that he was about to visit the Holy Places as a pilgrim, and bade them get ready all things necessary for the occasion.

The preparations lasted ten days, after which he set out with the Sultan, whose heart burned in yearning for his city, whence he had been absent a whole twelvemonth. They journeyed with an escort of Mamelukes carrying all manners of precious gifts and rarities, nor stinted they wayfaring day and night for a full year until they approached the Sultan’s capital, and sent on messengers to announce their coming. Then the Wazir and the whole army came out to meet him in joy and gladness, for they had given up all hope of ever seeing their King, and the troops kissed the ground before him and wished him joy of his safety. He entered and took seat upon his throne and the Minister came before him and, when acquainted with all that had befallen the young Prince, he congratulated him on his narrow escape.

When order was restored throughout the land, the King gave largess to many of his people, and said to the Wazir, “Hither the fisherman who brought us the fishes!” So he sent for the man who had been the first cause of the city and the citizens being delivered from enchantment, and when he came into the presence, the Sultan bestowed upon him a dress of honor, and questioned him of his condition and whether he had children. The fisherman gave him to know that he had two daughters and a son, so the King sent for them and, taking one dauhter to wife, gave the other to the young Prince and made the son his head treasurer. Furthermore, he invested his Wazir with the Sultanate of the City in the Black Islands whilom belonging to the young Prince, and dispatched with him the escort of fifty armed slaves, together with dresses of honor for all the emirs and grandees. The Wazir kissed hands and fared forth on his way, while the Sultan and the Prince abode at home in all the solace and the delight of life, and the fisherman became the richest man of his age, and his daughters wived with the Kings until death came to them.

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Poetry From Iraq: 3 Poets….

It is nice to gain a new perspective. I gift you three of them….

A Roman Colony

Saadi Youssef

We were Greeks,

Our houses at the edge of the Arabian Desert,

But we had two rivers

And a few villages and farms we irrigated with the waters of the rivers,

And we had a few poets too who composed in meter

And spoke of women

And flowers

And in Kinnesrin we built a school for philosophy.

The strange thing is that Aristotle’s students came every now and then

And told us about the latest treatises written in Athens.

But we were Greeks and farmers.

We made no weapons,

And did not know how to shape our boys into soldiers

(Aristotle’s students did not tell us that their teacher

Was training the son of Philip the Macedonian on the conquest of cities! ).

The world changes,

They said.

Even the sun will rise from the West.

……………………………….

………………………………….

…………………………………..

I’m jabbering now, hallucinating

And alone

In Kyriakos’s tavern in Sidon.

My clay goblet is black

And my hair all white.

I know no one I can tell – in confidence-

That the Romans had banished me

When we became a colony.

But I suspect that Kyriakos already knows all about this.

The world changes,

They said.

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The Anchor’s Song

Jamal Jumá

I am the anchor

no one touches the depths as I do.

Only the waves and water moss

know the beauty of my fall.

I don’t reveal my secrets

except to the drowned

I don’t say goodbye

except to the migrating fish.

I chose the sea

that my echo would not be lost

as I hit the bottom

I chose the sea

that I may not forget the water

as I head for the ground

I chose the sea

to camouflage my tears with water

that no one may see them

I’m the anchor

falling freely in countries with no name

sea shells and oysters only

are my friends

and everything hard wrapped in light

I was born like you were born

from steel, dust, and gold

I will die like you will die

but the ground will not forget me easily

not as long as it is filled with all these scratches

that my traversal creates.

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E-mail to Allah

Salah Hassan

Dear Allah,

I don’t have to speak to You

Like Mohammed al Maghout did

Nor like Fadhil al Azzawi

Now i have e-mail

And You can answer me

By a click on reply

Many questions bother me

And You must give an answer

In the meantime I have become forty five

And I think I am wise enough

To speak to You about Your duties

What are You doing all day?

Do You read the papers?

Do you listen to the radio?

Didn’t You hear anything in the Friday prayers

About Iraq?

The land where Your name is praised

Why do You do nothing?

Are You dead?

Is it only Your statue that we see?

I just want to know

Because in the meantime I have become forty five

And I don’t know yet what is your function in my life

Here you have all my contact information

Fax and telephone number

And e-mail address

I await an extensive explanation from You

I have no time to waste

With You.

With Deep Respect,

Salah Hassan

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Salah Hassan wrote an e-mail to Allah, but what he got back in return… was hatemail! His poem was published in a Moroccan newspaper, and was after that – without his knowledge – published on a website. He received about 75 pages with reactions, positive ones also, but also messages from people who wished him blind, deaf, and paralysed, to subsequently live long. He was openly threatened with death.

Salah: “These people are claiming the role of Allah. They say: we possess the wisdom. They are extremists and they are angry about my poem because it is directed to extremists. The extremists who make Iraq unsafe with their bomb attacks.”

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A weekend of Beauty!

Bright Blessings,

Gwyllm

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Ah…. exploration time. We will be exploring Arabic culture, and especially Iraqi poetry for a couple of days. I hope you will follow me on this foray. Some of it is good, some beautiful. All relevant for our times.

My friend Vera is from Iraq. Her family had to flee the regime there, back in the very early 70′s. She ended up in Lebanon, and then in L.A. She has wonderful stories. Her father was originally from Turkey. A very interesting person. I only knew him for a few years before he past on, but his presence was a blessing in my book. Vera’s Mom I think was from Syria originally. (I may be wrong) She is getting on now, and quite ill. Vera is taking care of her in Northern California Vera’s family were all Christian Arab/Turkish. Everyone that I met had most excellent tales, and had lived the interesting life. A lot of my early misconceptions of the middle-east were dispelled at their home. I had plenty of contact with Iranian (but of course the Iranians are Persian and not Arabic and don’t mention Turk to them!)

Vera’s family all knew how to party and to entertain. I felt a great privilege had been given to me to in my dealings with them. My love goes out to them all, and especially to Vera and her dear Mum.

Anyway, the Poetry section today is dedicated to Vera and her Mother.

On the Menu:

The Links

The Article: The Obelisk

The Poetry: Mahmoud al-Braikan

A thousand blessings on us all!

Gwyllm

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The Links:

Number of gays leaving military rises

Winter Soldier

What Kind of Libertarian Are You?

That Chilling Effect: Are 3500 German eDonkey file sharers really facing criminal prosecution?

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The Obelisk – by Hakim Bey

1. Dans la merde

No systematic ideation seems able to measure the universe—a one-to-one map even of the subjective world can probably only be achieved in non-ideational states. Nothing can be posited—”nevertheless, it moves.” Something comes into cognition, and consciousness attempts to structure it. This structure is then taken for the bedrock of reality, and applied as a mappa mundi—first as language, then as ideology inherent in language. These language/ideology complexes tend to become orthodoxies. For example, since the Enlightenment it has been considered indisputable that only one mode of consciousness is fully real; we might call it the consciousness that “falsifies”—i.e., that verifies science as true. Before the Enlightenment other orthodoxies held sway and valued other forms of consciousness or cognition. We could sum up these earlier orthodoxies under the rubrics of God and Nature, and perhaps associate them with the Neolithic and Paleolithic, respectively. Although these worldviews retain some adherents they have been archaeologically submerged, so to speak, by “Universal Reason”. The Enlightenment coincides with the first determined breakthrough into scientific instrumentality and the “conquest of Nature”; God survives the onslaught for another century but finally (after a deathbed scene of positively operatic length) succumbs around 1899. Nature is silent; God is dead. Ideology is rational and scientific; the dark ages are over. If we can say that the 18th century brought us the betrayal of Nature, and the 19th century the betrayal of God, then the 20th century has certainly produced the betrayal of (and by) ideology. Enlightenment Rationalism and its offshoot/rival Dialectical Materialism have expired and gone to heaven and left us “dans la merde” (as the dying Gurdjieff told his disciples), stuck in the mire of a material world reduced to the cruel abstraction of exchange and dedicated only to its own self-defacement and disappearance.

The fact is that any map will fit any territory…given sufficient violence. Every ideology is complicit with every other ideology—given enough time (and rope). These complexes are nothing but unreal estate, properties to be stripped of assets, vampirized for imagery, propped up to keep the marks in line, manipulated for profit—but not taken seriously by grown-ups. For the adult of the species there remains nothing but the atomized sell of exchange, and the unlikely consolations of greed and power.

2. Hermes Revividus

But there appear to exist other consciousnesses, and perhaps even kinds of cognition that remain uninvolved in consciousness in any ordinary sense. Aside from all scientific or religious definitions of these other forms, they persist in appearing, and are therefore potentially interesting. Without ideologizing these forms, can we still say anything useful about them? Language is still traditionally deemed ineffective in this regard. But theoria, originally in the sense of “vision” or insight, possesses a sudden and drifting nature, akin to poetry. In such terms could we speak of a kind of hermetic criticism (on the model of Dali’s “paranoia criticism”) capable of dealing with these other forms, however obliquely and glancingly?

It is Hermes who bridges the gap between the metalinguistic and the sublinguistic in the form of the message, language itself, the medium; he is the trickster who leads in misleading, the tremendum that echoes through the broken word. Hermes is therefore political, or rather ambassadorial—patron of intelligence and cryptography as well as an alchemy that seeks only the embodiment of the real. Hermes is between text and image, master of the hieroglyphs that are simultaneously both—Hermes is their significance, their translatability. As one who goes “up and down” between spirits and humans, Hermes Psychopomp is the shamanic consciousness, the medium of direct experience, and the interface between these other forms and the political. “Hermetic” can also mean “unseen”.

The late Ioan Couliano pointed out that Renaissance Hermeticism offered, as one definition of magic, the influence of text/image complexes “at a distance” on the conscious and unconscious cognition of subjects. In a positive sense these techniques were meant for the “divinizing” of the magus and of material creation itself; thus alchemy is seen as a freeing of consciousness (as well as matter) from the heavier and more negative forms and its realization as self-illumination. But as Blake—himself a great hermeticist—pointed out, everything has its “form and spectre,” its positive and negative appearance. If we look at the positive “form” of hermeticism we see it as liberation and therefore as politically radical (as with Blake, for instance); if we regard its “spectre”, however, we see that the Renaissance magi were the first modern spies and the direct ancestors of all spin-doctors, PR men, advertisers and brainwashers. “Hermetic criticism” as I see it would involve an attempt to “separate out” various formal and spectral aspects of communication theory and its modern applications; but this realm is choked with undergrowth and clear separations can rarely be defended. Let’s just say we’re looking for patches of sunlight.

3. Critique of the Image

The critique of the Image is at the same time a defense of the Imagination.

If the spectral hermeticism of the totality consists of the totality of its imagery, then clearly something can be said in defense of iconoclasm, and for resistance to the screen (the media interface). The perfection of exchange is presented as a universal imaginaire, as a complex of images (and text/image complexes) arranged through reproduction, education, work, leisure, advertising, news, medicine, death, etc., into an apparent consensus or “totality”. The unmediated is the unimagined—even though it is life itself we’re discussing, we have failed to imagine it, or to evaluate it. That which is present but remains unrepresented also remains virtually unreal for us, inasmuch as we have capitulated to the consensus. And since consciousness actually plays a rather miniscule role here, we all capitulate at least most of the time, either because we can’t stand too much reality, or because we’ve decided to think about it later, or because we’re afraid we’re insane, and so on.

Byzantine Iconoclasm and (later) Islam attempted to cut through the hermetic dilemma by “prohibiting” the Image. To a certain extent the latter succeeded, so that even its representational art deliberately refused perspective and dimensional illusion; moreover, in a way that Benjamin might have noticed, the painting never stands alone but is “alienated” by text that enters it and flattens it yet more. The “highest” arts are architecture as arrangement of organic space and calligraphy as arrangement of organic time; moreover the word is ideological for Islam—it not only represents logos but presents it as linearity, as a linked series of moments of meaning. Islam is “text-based” but it refuses the Image not simply to exalt the text. There are two “Korans” in Islam, and the other one is generally interpreted as integral with Nature itself as a kind of non-verbal semiotics, “waymarks on the horizon.” Hence the geomorphism of the architecture, and its interaction with water, greenery, landscape and horizon—and also its ideal interpenetration by calligraphic text.

Now admittedly this ideational or religious complex can assume its own intense rigidity and heaviness. Its truly luminous organicity can perhaps best be appreciated in old anonymous unofficial forms like the domed caravansaries of Central Asia or the African mud mosques rather than in the grand imperial Masterpieces— or the catastrophic modern capital cities of Islamdom. But wherever the Image has been lost and forgotten (or at least supplanted to some extent by other possibilities) it is possible to feel a certain lightness or relief from the burden of the image, and a certain lightness in the sense of luminousness as well. Even in modern Libya, which has banned all commercial advertising (and allows signs only in Arabic), one can experience at least a moment of the utopia of the absence of the image, the public image, the hieroglyphics of exchange, the iconolatry of representation. One can reject the authoritarianism of the ban on imagery without necessarily rejecting its intentionality. We could interpret it in a sufiistic manner—that a voluntary self-restraint vis-a-vis imagery and representation (a sublimation of the image) can result in a flow of power to the autonomous (“divinized”) imagination. This could also be envisioned as a suppression-and-realization in the dialectical sense. The purpose of such an exercise, from a sufi perspective, would be to channelize the “creative imagination” toward the realization of spiritual insight—for example, revealed or inspired texts are not merely read but re-created within the imaginal consciousness. Clearly this direct experience aspect of imaginal work may raise the question of one’s relation with orthodoxy and mediated spiritual authority. In some cases values are not merely re-created, but created. Values arc imagined. The possibility appears that orthodoxy may deconstruct itself, that ideology may be overcome from within. Hence the ambiguous relation between Islamic authorities and Islamic mystics.

Thc sufi critique of the Image can certainly be ‘”secularized” to the extent of adding to our own concept of hermetic criticism. (Some sufis were themselves hermeticists and even accepted the existence of Hermes Trismegestus as a “prophet”.) In other words, we do not oppose the Image as theological iconoclasts but because we require the liberation of the imagination itself—our imagination, not the mediated imaginaire of the market.

Of course this critique of the image could just as well be applied to the word—to the book—to language itself. And of course it should be so applied. To question a medium is not necessarily to destroy it, in the name of either orthodoxy or heresy. The Renaissance magi were not interested merely in reading the hieroglyphs but in writing them. Hieroglyphics was seen as a kind of projective semiotics or textual imaginal performance produced to effect change in the world. The point is that we imagine ourselves rather than allow ourselves to be imagined; we must ourselves write ourselves—or else be written.

4. The Unseen Obelisk

If oppression emanates from the power of that which is seen, then logic might compel us to investigate the possibility that resistance could ally itself with the power of that which is unseen. The unseen is not necessarily the invisible or the disappeared. It can be seen and might be seen. It is not yet seen—or it is deliberately hidden. It reserves the right to re-appear, or to escape from representation. This hermetic ambiguity shapes its tactical movement; to use a military metaphor, it practices guerrilla techniques of “primitive war” against those of “classical war”, refusing confrontation on unequal terms, melting into the generalized resistance of the excluded, occupying cracks in the strategic monolith of control, refusing the monopoly of violence to power, etc. (“Violence” here also signifies imagistic or conceptual violence.) In effect it opposes strategy (ideology) with tactics that cannot be strategically bound or ideologically fixed. It might be said that consciousness “alone” does not play as vital a role in this as certain other factors (“Freedom is a psycho-kinetic skill”).

For example, there is an aspect of the unseen that involves no effort, but consists simply in the experience of places that remain unknown, times that are not marked. The Japanese aesthetic term wabi refers to the power of such places or objects—it means “poor”. It is used to refer, for example, to certain teacups that appear badly-made (irregular, unevenly fired, etc.), but upon a more sensitive appraisal are seen to possess great expressiveness of “suchness”—an elegance that approaches conceptual silence—something of the melancholy of transitoriness, anonymity, a point at which poverty cannot be distinguished from the most refined aesthetic, a quintessence of the Taoist yin, the “mysterious power” of flowing water or empty space. Some of these teacups sell for millions. Most of them are made by Zen artisans who have achieved the state of wabi, but it might be said that the most prized of all would be made unselfconsciously (or even “unconsciously”) by genuinely poor craftsmen. This mania for the natural and spontaneous also finds its expression in the Taoist fondness for bizarre rocks that stimulate the imagination with convolutions and extrusions and strange imbalances. Zen gardeners prefer rocks that suggest distant mountains or islands, erasing all other images, or better yet rocks suggestive of nothing at all—non-ideational form—perfect poorness.

As soon as something is represented it becomes an image of itself, semiotically richer but existentially impoverished, alienated, drawn out of itself and extenuated—a potential commodity. The wabi of the teacups is seriously compromised by the high prices they command. To be effective (to produce “satori”) the object must be experienced directly and not mediated in exchange. Perhaps the really valuable cups are not yet seen because they are overlooked. No one can even perceive them, much less their value. The sole and spontaneous exception to this general inattentiveness is…ourselves!—we have imagined the value of wabi for these objects times or places—for ourselves. These are perhaps among the “small pleasures” that Nietzsche says are more important than the great ones. In some cases the melancholy aspect of these things is exacerbated by the realization that time itself has overcome ugliness and turned it into an unnoticed beauty. Certain streets in North Dublin capture this quality perfectly, as do some abandoned New Jersey industrial sites where the organic (rust, water, weeds) has sculpted old machinery into spontaneous pure form and landscape. This melancholia (which was held to be a trait or sign of creativity by the old hermeticists) approaches another aesthetic term, the Persian word dard—which literally means “pain”, but is applied in more subtle terms to the art of direct expression of certain musicians (especially singers) in the sense of a transparent and unaffected rnelancholic longing for an absent transcendent or beloved. The Persian fable teaches that the pain of rejected love turns an ordinary sparrow into a nightingale. The lover is poor as the dervish is poor, because desire is that which is not fulfilled—but from this poverty there emerges an aesthetic of wealth, an overflowing, a generosity or even painful excess of meaning—under the guise of melancholy and disappointment.

Aside from the inadvertancy of the unseen, there also exists a more active form, so to speak—the form of the deliberate unseen. This is part of the sphere wherein appears the consciousness of everyday life of itself and its tactical intention to enhance its own unmediated pleasures and the autonomy of its freedom from representation. Thus conditions are maximized for the potential emergence of “the marvelous” into the sphere of lived experience. This situation resembles that of the artist—but “art” enters this space only on condition that it refuses to mediate experience for us and instead “facilitate” it. One example would be a love affair based on an eroticism that does not appear in mediation, for which no “roles” are constructed, no commodities produced. Another example might be a spontaneous festival, or a temporary autonomous zone, or a secret society; here, “art” would regain its utilily.

The Renaissance magi understood that the ancient Egyplian obelisk was a perfect hermetic form for the dissemination of their hieroglyphic projective semiotics. From the top down it represents (mathematically) a sun-beam; from the bottom up, a lingam. It broadcasts or radiates its text/image complexes therefore both to the light above consciousness itself, and to the unconscious represented by sexuality. From the emblem-books such as the great Hypnerotomachia of 1499 we learn that the hermetic purpose for such monuments would be to call into existence the utopia of desire and the bliss of alchemical union. But the Magi never perfected their deciphering of the hieroglyphs and their utopia remained enclosed within the hermetic landscapes of the Emblems. The notion of the power of the obelisks, however, took root in western consciousness and unconsciousness, from the Napoleonic and British appropriations in Egypt to the Masonic involvement in the Washington Monument.

By contrast to the obelisk of the State, one could imagine a genuinely hermetic obelisk inscribed with magical writing about direct experience of non-ordinary consciousness; its effectiveness would consist of the near-impossibility of its being seen; it might, for example, be sited in a remote wilderness—or in the midst of abandoned industrial decay. It might even be buried. It would be a “poor” obelisk. Rumors would circulate about it. Those who actually found it would perhaps be deeply moved by its mysteriousness and remoteness. The obelisk itself might even have vanished, and been replaced again with a beam of dusty sunlight. But the story of it might retain some power.

5. The Organic Machine

But what is revolt for? Simply to assuage the terminal resentment of the eternally disappointed and belated? Could we not simply cease our agitation and pursue that teacup or that beam of sunlight, if we cannot be satisfied with the ecstasy of the totality? Why should our hermetic critique lead us to an assertion of a dialectic of presence over exchange, over alienation, over separation? If we pretend to “create values” then we should be prepared to articulate them, however much we may reject “ideology”. After all, pancapitalism also rejects ideology and has even proclaimed the end of the dialectic—are our values therefore to be subsumed in Capital? If so, then—why struggle?

One possible response to this question could be made on the basis of an existentialist revolt-for-revolt’s sake, in the tradition of Camus or the Italian Stirnerite anarchists. We would be ill-advised to despise this answer—but it may perhaps be possible to add to it in more positive terms (in terms of “form”, not “spectre”).

For example, we could say that the Paleolithic economy of the Gift still persists, along with the “direct experience” spirituality of shamanism, and the non-separation of “Society Against the State” (Pierre Clastres), in the form of those rights and customs discussed by E. P. Thompson, reflected in myth and folklore, and expressed in popular festal and heretically resistant forms throughout history. Refer to Bakhtin’s Rabelais, to Chrisiopher Hill’s Word Turn’d Upside Down, or Vaneigem’s Free.Spirit. In other words: a tradition of resistance has persisted since the Neolithic, unbroken by the rise of the first States, and even till today. Thus: we resist and revolt because it is our glorious heritage to do so—it is our “conservatism”. This resistance movement has become incredibly shabby and dusty since it first arose some 12,000 years ago in response to the “first ideologies” (agriculture, the calendar, the appropriation of labor)—but it still persists because it still defines most of the “empirical freedoms” that most people would like to enjoy: absence of oppression, peace, plenty, autonomy, conviviality or community, no rich or poor, spiritual expression and the pleasure of the body, and so on. It may be impossible to construct a system or ideology or strategy on such uncategorizable desires—but it is equally impossible to refute them with ideology, precisely because of their empirical and “tactical” nature. No matter what, they persist—even if they remain for all practical purposes unseen, still they refuse to go away. When all the ideeas have betrayed us, this “organic machine” (Society vs. the State) declines even to define itself as an idea. It remains loyal to our immemorial inarticulacy, our silence, our poorness.

Capital pursues its telos beyond the human. Science has already betrayed us—perhaps the next (or last) betrayal will be of the human itself, and of the entire material world. Only two examples need be given here to illuminate (rather than “prove”) this contention. The first concerns money, which in the last five or six years has transcended its links with production to the alarming degree that some 94.2% of the global “money supply” now consists of pure financial capital. I’ve called this the Gnostic uploading of the economic body, in honor of those old Gnostic Dualists and their hatred of everything material. The practical result of this situation is staggering for any consideration of economic justice as an “empirical” concern, since the migratory or nomadic nature of pancapitalism permits “disembodied Capital” to strip the productive economy of its assets in the cause of profits that can only be measured by purely “spiritual” means. Moreover, this Capital has become its own medium, and now attempts to define a universal discourse in which alternatives to exchange simply vanish as if they’d never existed and could never exist. Thus all human relations are to be measured in money.

To illustrate Capital as its own medium, and as our second example, we can look at bioengineering. There is no force that can prevent pancapitalism from acquiring patents to every identifiable gene. This means that farmers are now being asked to pay “rents” on certain genetic strains that they themselves developed, because the “rights” to those strains were acquired by the zaibatsus. The dubious triumph of cloning is supposed to compensate for the profit-driven ravaging of Nature’s last remnants. Moreover, the human genome project, which has “solved” the production of life as a biochemical machine, allows “evolution” itself to be coopted and absorbed into Capital. As the market envisions the future, the human itself will become humanity’s final commodity—and into this “value” the human will disappear. Capital’s self defacement implies humanity’s self-effacement. Acting as a purely spiritual substance—money—Capital will attain the ownership of life’s becoming, and thus the power to shape the very protoplasm of the material world as pure exchange.

Our essential question then concerns the possibility of the re-appearance of the unseen as opposition. Finally it would seem that a tactical refusal of all strategic systemization may be inadequate to bring about this desired re-appearance. A positive proposal is required to balance the gestures of refusal. We must hope that an organic strategy of victory will emerge as “spontaneous ordering” from the driftwork of tactics. Any attempt to impose this strategic unity from “above” must be renounced as (at best) nostalgia for the lost utopia of ideology—or as “bad religion” of some sort.

But just as the Image has its spectre and its form, so we might play with the notion that the Idea, too, has a spectral and a formal manifestation. As a “spook in the head” the idea remains nothing but a semantic trap—disguised for example as a moral imperative. But as a “form” in the Blakean sense the idea itself may take on organicity as a production of the body and the “creative intellect”, just as the image may be turned toward realization by the body and the “creative imagination”. Perhaps in some sense it is the idea that has remained unseen till now, and thus retains all its power, having never fallen away into representation. Neglected all along—having never been given a price—and perhaps remaining inexpressible even in its manifestation—this idea may “give meaning to revolt.” And it may be written ambiguously in hieroglyphs whose meaning is uncertain, but whose “magical” effect is nevertheless potent—it may be written even on a hidden obelisk. But it will have been written by us.

6. Platonic Nets

It seems as if there should exist two possible kinds of network (or even of communication technology)— one aristotelian, text-based, linear—the other platonic, image-based, non-linear. Language, for example, as viewed from this perspective might appear more platonic, since words are based on “inner pictures” and thus cannot be limited by pure lexicality or one-to-one “translation”; while by contrast a network of computers, using digital text-based programming, might appear as a perfect aristotelian system.

But this neat dualism dissolves into paradox and conundrum. Text itself is picture-based (hence “non-linear”) in Sumer, Egypt, China. Even our alphabet is picture-based; the letter “p”, for example, is simply an upside-down foot, since Indo-European words for “foot” almost always begin with “p” (or “f”). Text, which is supposed to be linear, is “language-based” and partakes of language’s non-linearity. When “speech genres” are textualized they become in some senses more linear (because stripped of contextual depth formerly provided by the extra dimensions of speech such as tone, gesture, performance, etc.)—but in some other ways this stripping of language to produce text results in further ambiguities, since the context of the text now consists largely of the reader and the reader’s inner world.

Thus the fact that computers are digital (simple on/off switches in massive array) and text-based does not make them genuine aristotelian machines, since image is already embedded in language, and even more because the screen itself is also already an image, whether it displays image, text, or both at once. If programming could be based directly on images rather than text—as some savants believe possible—the computer could easily be seen as a platonic machine. The platonizing effect of the computer is already present not only in its screenal display of images but also in the psychological reality of the screen as image. In effect, the computer is a hieroglyphic machine, an interface mode of text and image; hence its magic appearance to the unconscious.

The Renaissance magi (especially Athanasius Kircher) believed that the Egyptian hieroglyphs were purely platonic (—in this, they followed Plotinus and lamblichus)—that is, that each image was an ideal form, and that their deployment could not only indicate meaning but also create and project it. Thus the hieroglyphs were seen as an ideal amalgam of text and image—an emblematic form of writing. Now when Champollion deciphered the Rosetta Stone, it was discovered that hieroglyphs were already used quasi-alphabetically (on the model of “[picture] foot = [phoneme] p”), although there were also cases where single images or imageclusters represented the objects depicted as words. This discovery relegated the unsuccessful translation attempts of the old magi to complete oblivion. Their theories are now only mentioned in passing as examples of “false” hermetic science and bad Egyptology. But as Couliano noted, these discarded theories have great secret heuristic power, because they describe empirically some of the ways in which text, image, and mind interact. Once the neo-platonic metaphysics and crude magical fantasies have been discarded, hieroglyphic theory can be used to understand the mode of operation of text/image complexes—that is, emblems.

The emblem books were Renaissance experiments in the “projective semiotics” of hieroglyph-theory. Allegorical pictures accompanied by texts (often one text in prose and one in poetry)—and in a few cases even by music (the great Atalanta Fugiens of Michael Maier, for example)—were collected in sequences, published as books, and intended for the magical edification of readers. The “morals” of the emblems were thus conveyed on more than one level at once. Each emblem was simultaneously:

o a) a picture accompanied by words;

o b) a picture “translated” from words. That is, the pictures’ real values are not purely formal but also allegorical, so that Hercules stands for “strength”, Cupid for “desire”, and the emblem itself can be read as a “sentence” composed of these “words”;

o c) a hieroglyphic “coding” in which certain images not only represent words but also “express the essence” of those words, and project them in a “magical” manner, whether or not the reader is consciously aware of this process.

Our working hypothesis is that the world’s image of itself not only defines its possibilities but also its limits. The world’s representation of itself to itself (its “macrocosmic” image) is no more and no less than the self’s “microcosmic” image of itself “writ large” so to speak, on the level or mentalité and the imaginaire. This is part of our “secularized” hermetic theory; it explains, for instance, why emblems have influences on multiple levels of cognition.

The radical magi encountered a world wherein one world-image was locked in place—not just the geocentric cosmos but the whole Christian orthodox value system that went with it. Their subversive purpose revolved around the project of a free circulation of imagery, a breaking-up of the stasis and the creation of a more responsive model. The single world-view of orthodoxy was seen as stifling, tyrannical, oppressive. Inasmuch as the self interiorized this view it reproduced the oppression on the level of the subjective. The hermeticists opposed the very singleness of this worldview with a contradictory multiplicity, a critical form of “paganism” based on difference.

Analogously, since 1989-91 we have entered a new “dark age” in which one worldview (and its imaginaire) claims hegemony over all difference. Not only is “pancapitalism” a global system, it has also become its own medium, so to speak, in that it proposes a universal stasis of imagery. The free circulation of the image is blocked when one image of the world structures the world’s self-image. True difference is leached away toward disappearance and replaced by an obsessive re-cycling and sifting-through of “permitted” imagery within the single system of discourse (like the medieval theologians who supposedly quarreled over the gender of angels as the Turks besieged Byzantium). Pancapitalism “permits” any imagery that enhances profit—hence in theory it might permit any imagery—but in practice, it cannot. This is the crisis of “postmodernism”—crisis as a form of stasis, of infinite re-circulation of the same—the impossibility of difference.

Within the crisis of stasis all manner of imagery can be allowed or even encouraged when it tends toward the depiction of relation as exchange—even the imagery of terror, murder, crime—even the extinction of Nature and the Human—all this can be turned (as imagery at least!) into profit. What cannot be allowed (except perhaps as nostalgia) is the imagery of relations other than exchange. Nostalgia can be contained and marketed—but actual difference would threaten the hegemony of the one worldview. The “Gift Economy” of some nearly-extinguished “primitive tribe” makes excellent TV; our mourning for its disappearance can only boost the sales of whatever commodity might soothe our sense of loss. Mourning itself can become fetishized, as in the victorian era of onyx and jet and black-plumed graveyard horses. Death is good for Capital, because money is the sexuality of the dead. Corpses have already appeared in advertising—”real” corpses.

Assuming that our hypothesis holds so far, we might well ask from “whence” there could appear any image of true difference in such a situation. The obvious answer is that it would have to come from “outside” the stasis.

This means war, obviously. At the very least, it means “Image War”.

But how can we even begin to define what might lie “outside” the stasis? Are we not precisely engaged in a situation where all circulating images become part of the crisis of circulation? This is the “malign hermeticism” of the totality of mediation—its spectral metastasis, so to speak—ontology as oncology. Everything that enters the discourse, all that which is “seen”, is subverted by the very fact that there is only one discourse, one exchange. “Image War” might be just as productive for exchange as other forms of “pure war”, since it would at least offer an “illusion of choice”. This, then, is the hermetic crisis of the tactical media.

7. Tactical Media

The unseen lies at least potentially outside the space of the represented totality. Thus it becomes for tactical media a subject of great theoretical interest. But as media the tactical media must still mediate, and therefore the unseen remains “mysterious” in the precise sense of the term. Since only the seen can be described, the pure unseen cannot be written about or represented—although it can be communicated, at least in “Zen” terms.

However the unseen is not necessarily “pure”. If it were pure, it would interest us a great deal less that it does, sinee it would thereby share in a characteristic we associate with ideology and stasis. In fact the unseen attracts us because of its impurity.

In effect there appear to exist degrees of the unseen. The unseen can paradoxically appear even within the locked circularity of the mediated totality, either inadvertently or else by subversion. For example the TV show about the primitive tribe, and the melancholy of the disappearance of the Gift, cannot touch the unseen actuality of the Gift and its meaning for the people who know it. But sometimes the spoken text or the editing of the film will create potent cognitive dissonanes with certain images that suggest the presence of the unseen, at least for a few viewers who are prepared for such irruptions of the mysterious, its “guerrilla” raids on consensus consciousness.

Moreover, the “intimate media” remain relatively invisible to the totality because they are so “poor”. The petty extent to which such media participate in market economics, much less consensus aesthetics, makes them so insignificant as to render them meaningless for all practical purposes. Of course as soon as any energy and originality is seen to emanate from such media they are at once absorbed into Capital—and the unseen must retreat, drift on, evade definition, move elsewhere. But this process takes time, and time makes opportunities.

Thus tactical media could make use either of “guerrilla” operations within the media totality, or of intimate media that remain (in some impure manner) outside that totality. But in either case tactical integrity would demand that such “appearances” take place only where they can be effective—in military terms: where they can damage the totality without being absorbed into its “spectacle of dissidence” and permitted rebelliousness. Tactical media will retreat from any such englobement, and in such moments of tactical withdrawal tactical media may have to engage in violence and sacrifice (at least on a conceptual level). Tactical media will make mistakes—all the more so because of its improvisational nature, the absence of any overall strategy. Because tactical media refuses purity, it will engage—and it will be defeated, very often by its own “success”.

The purpose and intention of tactical media is precisely not to rejuvenate the consensus by allowing itself to be vampirized of its creative energies by the imaginaire of the UnDead and its “natural laws” of exchange. But we cannot say therefore that the purpose of tactical media “is” the destruction of the totality. This statement of identity would define an ideology or source of authority for tactical media, and limit it to the role of opposition—in effect, to its “spectral” appearance. We certainly don’t wish long life and success to the totality, but by defining ourselves (or our techniques) solely as “destructive” we are simply inviting our own recuperation into the pattern of oppression. Tatical media, I suggest, should be about something and for something—this would constitute its “formal” appearance.It should be for the unseen—even for a seduction into the unseen.

Does this mean that the tactics of tactical media can only be defined “situationally”? Even if we reject all ideologizing of intentionality can we still say anything descriptive about specific goals? If we refuse strategy, can we nevertheless articulate something about a tendency or movement or unifying imaginaire of presence (a “myth” perhaps) that might underlie and inform our tactical mediations?

This may indeed be possible, if only because the imaginal values in the process of emergence in tactical media seem to concern those empirical freedoms expressed not only in immemorial “rights and customs” but also in the most radical politics of desire. In other words, an “organic” substitute for strategy/ideology arises from a shared imaginaire based on such traditional yet radical perspectives. It is in this way that tactical media can be seen as an aspect of a possible effective opposition to exchange itself, to the post ideological ideology of Capital—an opposition that cannot be englobed, and therefore can contemplate the possibility of victory.

All this is pure hypothesis, so it would be pointless and perhaps even counter-productive to engage in any attempt to prescribe or predict or even to influence the tactical media. The historical movement envisioned here (which even faces thc challenge of the very “End of History”) can make nothing out of any outmoded vanguardism or “unacknowledged legislator”-ism of a discredited intelligentsia, artists, etc., etc. It does, however, seem possible lo adopt an ”experimental” approach. Who can foretell succcss or failure? An inherent weakness for narrativity, however, and a desire to work on some sort ol “emblematic” structure leads me to an “aimless wandering” or taoist theorizing around certain themes considered here—notably the notions of hermeticism in both its “formal” and “spectral” aspects. For instance: since money is “imaginal” it is susceptible to hermetic manipulation—even to the “intuition” discussed by such strange billionaires as George Soros. It seems theoretically possible to “hack” money at the level of its representationality—all the more so now that most of it is pure representation. Money that can be manipulated imagistically because money itself is image, however, can also be “downloaded” from its CyberGnostic numisphere and manifested on the earthly plane as hard cash, goods, production. Thus it would appear feasible to redirect capital as wealth, away from areas where pancapitalism has “decreed” its (symbolic) presence, into areas where it has “forbidden” its (real) presence.

“Decree” and “forbid” are enclosed by quotation marks because in truth the situation is so complex that “legality” has become an extremely ambiguous category. Money as medium is engulfed in the same crisis of definition as all the other media. Into this space of uncertainty, hermetic operations could be directed (in perfectly legal ways) such as to interfere with the circulation of Capital. The space of uncertainty—the crack in the monolith of representation—has its deep origin in the intense anxiety of the crisis of stasis. The image of the imaginaire as a labyrinth with no exit induces a kind of claustrophobia akin to that experienced by the Renaissance occultists in relation to the cosmic stasis of doctrine: escape panic. We are after all still “in transition” toward a perfect global market—the cosmos of economy is not yet fully and flawlessly enclosed.

Hence for instance the sudden obsession with “content”. What are we going to do with all the data—what use is it? And who shall create in order that others (all others) may consume? A real puzzle.

Certain elements within political structures still retain a half-hearted sentimentality about the “Social” state; they still want to help program the “content”. They are opposed by the zaibatsus that demand “pure” content, measurable only by price rather than value. But what do “the people” want? Into the tactical spaces left vacant by this clash of bewildered titans, certain mediations might be effected. The old magic power of the scribe, the hermetic initiate, might constitute a counter-force to the magic power of the manipulation of content, the monopoly of meaning and interpretation claimed by the totality (which suddenly doesn’t look quite so total…).

As we are discussing media, the evocation of the word “magic” seems somehow permissible. How relevant these musings might prove to situations encountered in unmediated reality—perhaps that is another kettle of fish. For now, however, we are simply exercising our imagination.

____________

Poetry: Mahmoud al-Braikan (Iraq)

THE UNDERGROUND RIVER

The mysterious river

flows quietly underground

It flows in the dark

It makes no sound

It has no shape

It flows under the scorched desert

beneath the fields and orchards

under villages and cities

It runs and runs

towards its unknown mouth

through caves and lakes and reservoirs

It patiently carves its bed

in time with the pulse of the earth

The mysterious underground river

that has no name

that leaves no trace

on any map

in any guidebook

That underground river

eternally flows

It flows and flows

——–

DESERTED CITY

On one of my journeys

I entered it, a silent city

devoid of any sign of life

its doors closed

wind blowing in its squares

but the lights in its windows

burning all through the night.

Who switches the lights on?

I saw the wilted flowers

and the children’s broken swings

in the park . . .

I knocked on doors,

and called. Could it be

that they have all died? Or left?

Or become invisible

because of some kind of spell?

Then I suddenly saw

the shadow of a woman

move slowly upon its marble plinth

struggling to awake from sleep,

and I called: “Eve, don’t you know

who I am? – Adam.”

But she couldn’t recognise

the language I spoke.

——-

THE VOICE

A voice like no other

comes from the end of wilderness

A voice like the call

of a dying god

who utters his curse

the groans of a wounded beast

the howling of a wind

that is not of this world.

A voice stabs in the night

in its heart.

In the beginning

no one heard it.

Then they got used to it

as it cut through the glittering lights of their city.

No one paid attention

any longer

No one questioned

its presence.

You alone, poet,

stay up all night

awaiting the voice

that is wrapped in mystery

And why wouldn’t it be possible

to advance the idea

that calamities are to be

expected, and that disasters

will strike?

——–

THE KNOCKER

A light knock on the door

On the door a low-sounding

albeit very clear

knock

repeated night after night

which I anticipate

I listen to it

with its regular beat

that rises gradually

then abates

I open my door

but there is no one there.

Who is this

disguised knocker?

Could it be a ghost

returned from the darkness of the grave?

The victim of a vanished past?

A previous life

that has come back

to seek revenge?

A soul burdened with guilt

that roams in search of forgiveness?

A messenger from the beyond

who brings me a vague invitation

and a horse

to take me there?

Translated by Sargon Boulus

Translated from a new gathering of Mahmoud al-Braikan’s poems Matahat al-Farasha, 70 Qassida 1958-98, [The Butterfly Labyrinth, 70 Poems 1958-98], assembled, selected and introduced by Bassem Al-Meraiby, Nippur Förlag, Sweden, 2003. Reprinted here from Banipal No 17, Summer 2003

————–

BIO:

MAHMOUD AL-BRAIKAN was born in al-Zubair, southern Iraq. He studied law at Baghdad University in the 1940s. From 1953 to 1959 he was a teacher in Kuwait, then returned to Baghdad and completed his law studies in 1964. He taught Arabic language and literature at Basra’s Teachers’ Training College until his retirement in the 1990s. He was killed in his Basra home on 28 February 2002, apparently by thieves.

“The few early poems that were known by specialists and some friends were enough to give Mahmoud al-Braikan an equal or a near-equal voice to that of Sayyab and other pioneers of Iraqi and Arabic modern poetry. His legendary long and (for some) strange silence and the deliberate distance he maintained from all literary and social affairs, have now taken on a prophetic meaning. They shielded him from any kind of compromise with Saddam’s Iraq where a writer who respected himself and the creative ethic had to learn early how to keep silent.” Kadhim Jihad, writing about Al-Braikan in Banipal No 17.

Strange Synchronicities… Three of our pictures tonight were tied to “Auguries of Innocence” on Google … including Robert Venosa’s work. The Blake Painting I could understand of course… 8o)

More rain today. Woke up at 2:30 this morning, fell back to sleep at 5:30 until 8:45. Mary has been painting Rowans’ room. I have been working on the Magazine and other projects. Nephew Andrew came by, stayed a few hours. He seems well. We talked about Magick, and where free will and predestination might coincide/collide.

Listening to the new David Gilmour album, courtesy of Gordon. Wonderful Stuff! Good for rainy evenings.

On the Menu:

The Links…

Quote of the Day: Bill Hicks

Sophia’s Light

The Poetry: Auguries of Innocence – William Blake

I hope you enjoy…

Gwyllm

___________

The Links:

London’s heart of stone

Visualizing Sound

Animusic 2 – 03 – Resonant Chamber

Colombia’s ‘lost war’ against cocaine

______________

Quote of the Day:

Such a weird belief. Lot of Christians wear crosses around their necks. You think when Jesus comes back he’s gonna want to see a f’ing cross, man? “Owwwwww”. May be why he hasn’t shown up yet. “Man, they’re still wearing crosses. F**k it, I’m not goin, dad. No, they totally missed the point. When they start wearing fishes I might show up again, but… Let me bury fossil heads with you Dad”…you know, kinda like going up to Jackie Onassis with a rifle pendant on, you know. “Thinkin’ of John, Jackie. We love him. Just tryin to keep that memory alive, baby.”

Bill Hicks

______________

Sophia’s Light (A nighttime prayer) (AGCA)

In darkest night, when lights are dim,

and all in sight seems sad and grim,

I find you there, your arms surround me,

your spirit fills me and it grounds me.

I look to you, Lady of Truth,

most ancient One, yet eternal youth,

to keep me safe, protect my heart,

and with the wisdom you impart

fill up my empty mind and soul

so that, my Lover, you can make whole,

all that was broken in this day –

and that is what I ask and pray.

______________

Auguries of Innocence – William Blake

To see a world in a grain of sand

And a heaven in a wild flower,

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand

And eternity in an hour.

A robin redbreast in a cage

Puts all heaven in a rage.

A dove-house filled with doves and pigeons

Shudders hell through all its regions.

A dog starved at his master’s gate

Predicts the ruin of the state.

A horse misused upon the road

Calls to heaven for human blood.

Each outcry of the hunted hare

A fibre from the brain does tear.

A skylark wounded in the wing,

A cherubim does cease to sing.

The game-cock clipped and armed for fight

Does the rising sun affright.

Every wolf’s and lion’s howl

Raises from hell a human soul.

The wild deer wandering here and there

Keeps the human soul from care.

The lamb misused breeds public strife,

And yet forgives the butcher’s knife.

The bat that flits at close of eve

Has left the brain that won’t believe.

The owl that calls upon the night

Speaks the unbeliever’s fright.

He who shall hurt the little wren

Shall never be beloved by men.

He who the ox to wrath has moved

Shall never be by woman loved.

The wanton boy that kills the fly

Shall feel the spider’s enmity.

He who torments the chafer’s sprite

Weaves a bower in endless night.

The caterpillar on the leaf

Repeats to thee thy mother’s grief.

Kill not the moth nor butterfly,

For the Last Judgment draweth nigh.

He who shall train the horse to war

Shall never pass the polar bar.

The beggar’s dog and widow’s cat,

Feed them, and thou wilt grow fat.

The gnat that sings his summer’s song

Poison gets from Slander’s tongue.

The poison of the snake and newt

Is the sweat of Envy’s foot.

The poison of the honey-bee

Is the artist’s jealousy.

The prince’s robes and beggar’s rags

Are toadstools on the miser’s bags.

A truth that’s told with bad intent

Beats all the lies you can invent.

It is right it should be so:

Man was made for joy and woe;

And when this we rightly know

Through the world we safely go.

Joy and woe are woven fine,

A clothing for the soul divine.

Under every grief and pine

Runs a joy with silken twine.

The babe is more than swaddling bands,

Throughout all these human lands;

Tools were made and born were hands,

Every farmer understands.

Every tear from every eye

Becomes a babe in eternity;

This is caught by females bright

And returned to its own delight.

The bleat, the bark, bellow, and roar

Are waves that beat on heaven’s shore.

The babe that weeps the rod beneath

Writes Revenge! in realms of death.

The beggar’s rags fluttering in air

Does to rags the heavens tear.

The soldier armed with sword and gun

Palsied strikes the summer’s sun.

The poor man’s farthing is worth more

Than all the gold on Afric’s shore.

One mite wrung from the labourer’s hands

Shall buy and sell the miser’s lands,

Or if protected from on high

Does that whole nation sell and buy.

He who mocks the infant’s faith

Shall be mocked in age and death.

He who shall teach the child to doubt

The rotting grave shall ne’er get out.

He who respects the infant’s faith

Triumphs over hell and death.

The child’s toys and the old man’s reasons

Are the fruits of the two seasons.

The questioner who sits so sly

Shall never know how to reply.

He who replies to words of doubt

Doth put the light of knowledge out.

The strongest poison ever known

Came from Caesar’s laurel crown.

Nought can deform the human race

Like to the armour’s iron brace.

When gold and gems adorn the plough

To peaceful arts shall Envy bow.

A riddle or the cricket’s cry

Is to doubt a fit reply.

The emmet’s inch and eagle’s mile

Make lame philosophy to smile.

He who doubts from what he sees

Will ne’er believe, do what you please.

If the sun and moon should doubt,

They’d immediately go out.

To be in a passion you good may do,

But no good if a passion is in you.

The whore and gambler, by the state

Licensed, build that nation’s fate.

The harlot’s cry from street to street

Shall weave old England’s winding sheet.

The winner’s shout, the loser’s curse,

Dance before dead England’s hearse.

Every night and every morn

Some to misery are born.

Every morn and every night

Some are born to sweet delight.

Some are born to sweet delight,

Some are born to endless night.

We are led to believe a lie

When we see not through the eye

Which was born in a night to perish in a night,

When the soul slept in beams of light.

God appears, and God is light

To those poor souls who dwell in night,

But does a human form display

To those who dwell in realms of day.

(Roberto Venosa)

Sunday Night:

Thunderstorms, torrential rains… dreams of strangeness. Dark now, with very heavy rains. Lightning all over the place. Went to a party on Saturday night, a Brazilian Party to be exact. Discovered I liked Brazilian Rum. Discovered Sunday morning that it doesn’t always agree with me. Aiyeee. A slow Sunday that proceeds into the distance now…

Rowan headed off to camp for a week of counselling 6th graders at OutDoor School, along with his friend Ryan at 11:00 in the morning. Kinda miss him already. He went in a flurry of hurry and forgotten items. He rolls and tumbles towards his future in such a funny way. Watching him move forward with his life has taken some great turns lately. If I had only known what fun this all could be. He holds up a mirror for me, like no other person ever has. The moments I spend with him are some of the best, and sometimes the hardest. I have to walk my talk with this one…

So I sit here, in the darkening night, listening to Kate Bush’s latest album. Eric Satie a bit earlier. The house is quiet, but for the rain. The fullness of the season, and the beauty of it all.

Tonights’ Entry is in memory of the Paris Commune, of 1871.

A blessing to you and yours.

Gwyllm

__________

On the Menu:

The Satanic Links…

The Article: 135 Years Ago, The Paris Commune

The Poetry: Rumi

The Art: Illustrations from The Paris Commune of 1871 by Eugene Schulkind

______________

The Satanic Links:

10 Things I Hate About Commandments

Satan’s Ipod….

Church of Satan Versus Apple…

Eurovision!

______________

135 Years Ago…

A brief history of the world’s first socialist working class uprising. The workers of Paris, joined by mutinous National Guardsmen, seized the city and set about re-organising society in their own interests based on workers’ councils. They could not hold out, however, when more troops retook the city and massacred 30,000 workers in bloody revenge

The Paris Commune is often said to be the first example of working people taking power. For this reason it is a highly significant event, even though it is ignored in the French history curriculum. On May 18 1871, after France was defeated by Prussia in the Franco-Prussian war, the French government sent troops into Paris to try and take back the Parisian National Guard’s cannon before the people got hold of it. Much to the dismay of the French government, the citizens of Paris had got hold of them, and wouldn’t give them up. The soldiers refused to fire on their own people and instead turned their weapons on their officers.

The PNG held free elections and the citizens of Paris elected a council made up mostly of Jacobins and Republicans (though there were a few anarchists and socialists as well). The council declared that Paris was an independent commune and that France should be a confederation of communes. Inside the Commune, all elected council members were instantly recallable, paid an average wage and had equal status to other commune members.

Contemporary anarchists were excited by these developments. The fact that the majority of Paris had organised itself without support from the state and was urging the rest of the world to do the same was pretty exciting. The Paris Commune led by example in showing that a new society, organised from the bottom up, was possible. The reforms initiated by the Commune, like turning workplaces into co-operatives, put anarchist theory into practice. By the end of May, 43 workplaces had become co-operatives and the Louvre Museum was a munitions factory run by a workers’ council.

The Mechanics Union and the Association of Metal Workers stated “our economic emancipation . . . can only be obtained through the formation of workers’ associations, which alone can transform our position from that of wage earners to that of associates.” They also advised the Commune’s Commission on Labour Organisation to support the following objectives: “The abolition of the exploitation of man by man… The organisation of labour in mutual associations and inalienable capital.” Through this, it was hoped that within the Commune, equality would not be an “empty word”. In the words of the most famous anarchist of the time, Mikhail Bakunin, the Paris Commune was a “clearly formulated negation of the state”.

However, anarchists argue that the Commune did not go far enough. Those within the Commune didn’t break with the ideas of representative government. As another famous anarchist, Peter Kropotkin said: “if no central government was needed to rule the independent Communes… then a central municipal government becomes equally useless… the same federative principal would do within the Commune”. As the Commune kept some of the old ideas of representative democracy, they stopped the people within the Commune from acting for themselves, instead trusting the governors to sort things out for them.

Anarchists argued for federations of directly democratic mass assemblies had been set up just like the people of Paris had done just over a hundred years previously (must be something in the water!).

The council became increasingly isolated from those who’d elected it. The more isolated it got, the more authoritarian it got. The council set up a “Committee of Public Safety” to “defend [by terror]” the “revolution”. This Committee was opposed by the anarchist minority on the council and was ignored by the people who, unsurprisingly, were more concerned with defending Paris from invasion by the French army. In doing so, they proved right the old revolutionary cliché of ‘no government is revolutionary’!

On May 21st, the government troops entered the city and were met with seven days of solid street fighting. The last stand of the Communards took place at the cemetary of Montmartre, and after the defeat troops and armed members of the capitalist class roamed the city, killing and maiming at will. 30,000 Communards were killed in the battles, many after they had surrendered, and their bodies dumped in mass graves.

The legacy of the Commune lived on, however, and “Vive la commune!” (“Long live the Commune!” was painted over on the walls of Paris during the 1968 uprising, and not for the last time we can be sure…

_________

Poetry: Rumi…

If you can disentangle

yourself from your selfish self

all heavenly spirits

will stand ready to serve you

If you can finally hunt down

your own beastly self

you have the right

to claim Solomon’s Kingdom

You are that blessed soul who

belongs to the garden of paradise

is it fair to let yourself

fall apart in a shattered house

You are the bird of happiness

in the magic of existence

what a pity when you let

yourself be chained and caged

But if you can break free

from this dark prison named body

soon you will see

you are the sage and the fountain of life

—

Gone to the Unseen

At last you have departed and gone to the Unseen.

What marvelous route did you take from this world?

Beating your wings and feathers,

you broke free from this cage.

Rising up to the sky

you attained the world of the soul.

You were a prized falcon trapped by an Old Woman.

Then you heard the drummer’s call

and flew beyond space and time.

As a lovesick nightingale, you flew among the owls.

Then came the scent of the rosegarden

and you flew off to meet the Rose.

The wine of this fleeting world

caused your head to ache.

Finally you joined the tavern of Eternity.

Like an arrow, you sped from the bow

and went straight for the bull’s eye of bliss.

This phantom world gave you false signs

But you turned from the illusion

and journeyed to the land of truth.

You are now the Sun –

what need have you for a crown?

You have vanished from this world –

what need have you to tie your robe?

I’ve heard that you can barely see your soul.

But why look at all? –

yours is now the Soul of Souls!

O heart, what a wonderful bird you are.

Seeking divine heights,

Flapping your wings,

you smashed the pointed spears of your enemy.

The flowers flee from Autumn, but not you –

You are the fearless rose

that grows amidst the freezing wind.

Pouring down like the rain of heaven

you fell upon the rooftop of this world.

Then you ran in every direction

and escaped through the drain spout . . .

Now the words are over

and the pain they bring is gone.

Now you have gone to rest

in the arms of the Beloved.

—-

REALITY AND APPEARANCE

‘Tis light makes colour visible: at night

Red, greene, and russet vanish from thy sight.

So to thee light by darness is made known:

Since God hat none, He, seeing all, denies

Himself eternally to mortal eyes.

From the dark jungle as a tiger bright,

Form from the viewless Spirit leaps to light.

—-

DESCENT

I made a far journey

Earth’s fair cities to view,

but like to love’s city

City none I knew

At the first I knew not

That city’s worth,

And turned in my folly

A wanderer on earth.

From so sweet a country

I must needs pass,

And like to cattle

Grazed on every grass.

As Moses’ people

I would liefer eat

Garlic, than manna

And celestial meat.

What voice in this world

to my ear has come

Save the voice of love

Was a tapped drum.

Yet for that drum-tap

From the world of All

Into this perishing

Land I did fall.

That world a lone spirit

Inhabiting.

Like a snake I crept

Without foot or wing.

The wine that was laughter

And grace to sip

Like a rose I tasted

Without throat or lip.

‘Spirit, go a journey,’

Love’s voice said:

‘Lo, a home of travail

I have made.’

Much, much I cried:

‘I will not go’;

Yea, and rent my raiment

And made great woe.

Even as now I shrink

To be gone from here,

Even so thence

To part I did fear.

‘Spirit, go thy way,’

Love called again,

‘And I shall be ever nigh thee

As they neck’s vein.’

Much did love enchant me

And made much guile;

Love’s guile and enchantment

Capture me the while.

In ignorance and folly

When my wings I spread,

From palace unto prison

I was swiftly sped.

Now I would tell

How thither thou mayst come;

But ah, my pen is broke

And I am dumb.

——-

On the Music Box: Liquid Sound Company…

Almost Midnight… Thursday:

A lovely warm day here in Portland. Worked up a ladder on a wall, of course with the warmth on the south side. Semi-Toasted in the solar way this evening…

Mary rented a unique little film from Netflix, “Ushpizin”, taking place during the Sukkot feast. Kind of a very hip, Hassidic moment in our spaced-time continuum. Worth the time, and really very, very good. Recommended.

Todays’ selections are from Homer, Hymns for various Goddesses. It is not a large entry. I have been putting out rather large ones lately, so I thought something simple might be good for Friday…

Earthrites now has a guest book:Drop a message Kids!

Cheers,

Gwyllm

——–

Piano buried on UK’s highest peak

More Stupidity From DARPA

How I see the Universe at times, as Information!

Can This Black Box See Into the Future?

________

To Earth, Mother of All

Of Gaia sing I, Mother firm of all,

the eldest one, who feedeth life on earth,

whichever walk on land or swim the seas,

or fly; sustaineth She each from Her Wealth.

Through Thee the folk are blest in child and fruit,

O Queen, who giveth and reclaimeth Life

of mortals; rich whoe’er it pleaseth Thee

to honor; all abundance is for them;

their fertile land is fruitful; through the fields

their flocks do thrive; their house is filled with goods.

They rule well-ordered states with women fair,

and ample wealth and riches follow them;

their sons exult with youthful merriment;

their daughters play in dances flower-strewn

with happy heart, and skip through fields abloom.

Such givest Thou, Holy Rich Divinity.

So hail, God-Mother, Starry Heaven’s Wife;

repay my song with pleasing sustenance!

Of Thee I’m minded – and another song.

—–

To the Mother of the Gods

The Mother of all Gods and mortals, laud

Thou clear-voiced Muse, Thou daughter of great Zeus.

The din of drums and rattles, shriek of flutes,

delight Her, like the call of bright-eyed wolves

and lions, heard through hill and wooded stream.

So hail to Thee, and all the Goddesses!

—–

To Hestia

Thou, Hestia, in ev’ry lofty home

of deathless Gods and folk who walk the Earth,

hath gained a seat eternal, honor grand;

Thy prize is fair and noble; lacking Thee,

feast not we mortals, if both first and last

we offer not sweet wine to Hestia.

Thou, Argus-Slaying Zeus’ and Maia’s Son,

Gods’ Herald, giving goods, with rod of gold –

be kind, You two, and help us, awed and fond.

Inhabit this fair house as mutual friends;

for You, who know the noble deeds of folk

who walk the earth, sustain their wit and youth.

Hail, Kronos’ Child, and Hermes with the rod!

I will remember You and one more song.

—–

Aphrodite

Demure and lovely Aphrodite, crowned in gold,

I praise, who holds the battlements of Cyprus, sea

girt, where the humid blowing breath of Zephyrus

propelled Her o’er the tumbling rumbling ocean waves

in gentle foam, and golden-diademed Hours received

Her willingly, and wrapped Her ’round with clothes divine.

Upon Her deathless brow They placed a well-wrought crown,

both fair and golden; into Her pierced ears They put

adornments made of orichalc and costly gold;

around Her tender neck and breasts as white as snow

arranged They necklaces of gold, like those with which

the golden-diademed Hours adorn Themselves to tread

the charming dance of Gods, or walk Their father’s halls.

And when She’d been adorned with every finery,

They led Her to the Gods, who saw and welcomed Her

with outstretched hands; and each implored that She

might be His lawful wife and come into His house;

They gaped at violet-diademed Cytherea’s form.

Hail, Thou sweetly winning one, with fluttering eyes;

and give the victory to me! Enhance my song!

For I remember Thee and yet another song.

“When a mans sleep is better then his waking – it is better that he should die”

(Mansur Al Hallaj)

A big Thanks To Mike Crowley for helping to inspire this edition. He alerted me to a quote I had put in yesterday’s entry… and so here we are with another Sufi Poet Saint, Mansur al-Hallaj. Except for the quotes, everything in this edition is his writings…. Really, his works are quite beautiful.

Have a good day, and enjoy this entry!

Gwyllm

On The Menu:

The Links

The Article: From The Tawasin of Mansur Al-Hallaj ,The Garden of Gnosis

Poetry: Selected works from al-Hallaj

Bio of al-Hallaj

The Art: Various Persian Minatures…

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The Links

Your Bollywood!

Cartoon

Guess I will pass on the Blue-Ray…

Saving Secular Society

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From The Tawasin of Mansur Al-Hallaj

The Garden of Gnosis

Abu ‘Umara al-Husayn ibn Mansur Al-Hallaj, may Allah purify his soul, said:

The definite noun is included in the understanding of the indefinite noun, and the indefinite noun is included in the understanding of the definite noun. Non-definiteness is a mark of the gnostic and ignorance is his form.

The external form of gnosis is concealed from the understandings and returns to them. How does he know Him where there is now ‘how’? Where did he know Him where there is no ‘where’? How did he reach Him and there is no idea of union? How did he separate from Him and there is no separation. Pure definiteness cannot be the object of any limited or numbered object, nor does it have need of maintenance nor is it worn out.

Gnosis is beyond the idea of beyond, and beyond spatial limit and beyond the intention, and beyond awareness, and beyond received traditions, and beyond perception. Because all of these are something which was not in existence before being, and came into being in a place. He has never ceased to be, was and is before dimensions, causes and effects. So how can these dimensions contain Him, or limitations comprehend Him?

He who says: ‘I know Allah by my lack of Him,’ how can he who lacks know Him who always is?

He who says: ‘I know Him because I exist’ – two external absolutes cannot co-exist.

He who says: ‘I know Him because I am ignorant of Him’ – ignorance is only a veil, and gnosis is beyond the veil. If not, there is no reality to it.

He who says ‘I know Him by His Name’ – the Name is not separable from the Named because He is not created.

He who says: ‘I know Him by Himself’ – this alludes to two objects of recognition.

He who says: ‘I know Him by His works’ – that is suffice oneself with the works without looking for the One who made them.

He who says: ‘I know Him by my inability to know Him’ – this one is unable to cut off, so how can the connected perceive the known object?

He who says: ‘As He knew me, I know Him’ – that is to allude to formal knowledge (‘ilm) and to return to the known which is different from the Divine Essence. Being distinct from the Essence how can it perceive the Essence?

He who says: ‘I know Him as He has described Himself.’ It is to be satisfied with traditional authority without immediate confirmation.

He who says: ‘I know Him by the anti-thetical Attributes’ – the known is one thing which does not admit of being confined or cut into sections.

He who says: ‘The object alone knows Himself’ – He confirms that the gnostic is tied by his difference, because the object never ceaces to know Himself in Himself.

Oh Marvel! Man does not know before a hair of his body how it grew black to white. So how will he know He who made things exist? He who does not know the summary or the analysis, nor the First and the Last, nor changes, nor causes, nor realities, nor devices, it is not possible for him to have knowledge of He who does not cease to exist.

Praise be to Him who veiled them by the Name, the definition and the mark! He veiled them under a word, a circumstance, perfection, and beauty from the One who always was and will be! The heart is a piece of flesh, so gnosis cannot take residence there, being a divine substance.

Understanding has two logical dimensions: extension and breadth. The pious spiritual life has two aspects: traditions and obligations. The totality of the creatures of creation is in the heavens and on the earth.

But gnosis has neither extension nor breadth, no seat in the heavens nor on the earth, it does not abide in the exterior forms nor in the interior intentions as do traditions and obligations.

He who says: ‘I know Him by His reality’ – he makes his existence superior to that of the Object. Because whoever knows something in its proper reality becomes more powerful than the simple object of which he has knowledge.

Oh man! Nothing in creation is smaller than the atom, and you do not perceive it. How can one who cannot recognize the atom be able to know He who is subtler than the atom to perceive?

What is exluded goes to the side which perishes and that which is enclosed remains on the side of the essential knowledge. The essence of gnosis is concealed in its name by its gnosis. It remains disjoined and severed from the thoughts, objects of distraction, and forgetfulness.

He who wants gnosis fears them, and he who fears them frees himself from them, and draws apart from them. Its East is West and its West is East. It does not have a place above the higher world and it does not have a place below the lower one.

Gnosis is removed from the existential things, it remains constantly with the Divine permanence. Its paths are narrow, and there is no road of access to it. Its meanings are clear but there is no guide to it. The senses do not perceive it, and the descriptions of men do not attain to it.

He who possesses it is solitary and he who mixes it becomes a heretic. He who strips it away becomes blind and he who attaches himself to it, perishes. Its lightning is an unceasing supply of water, its blow gives freely, and its arrow sticks, and when it throws to the ground it silences. One who fears it becomes an ascetic and it makes a watcher of the careless. Its tent-ropes are the gnostics and the means of ascent.

Gnosis has no other analogy that itself. Allah has no other analogy than Himself, and He resembles it. He is like it and He is like Himself, as it is analogous to itself. He is only like Himself and it is only like itself.

Its edifices are its supports and its supports are its edifices. Those who possess it are those who possess it, and its edifices are to it, in it, and by it.

It is not Him, and He is not it. And there is no He except it and no it except Him. There is no gnosis except Him. There is no He except Him!

So the gnostic is ‘the one who sees’ and gnosis resides in ‘he who remains.’ The gnostic stays with his act of cognition because he is his cognition and His cognition is him and gnosis is beyond that, and the Object is still further beyond that.

The story is the business of the story-tellers and gnosis is the business of the elect, and affectations of behavior are the business of individuals and utterance is with the people of delusion, and meditation is with the people of despair, and negligence with the people who are wild.

Allah is Allah. Creation is creation.

And it does not matter!

_______

Poetry By Al Hallaj

” For your sake, I hurry over land and water:

For your sake, I cross the desert and split the mountain in two,

And turn my face from all things,

Until the time I reach the place

Where I am alone with You.”

—-

Kill Me, My Faithful Friends

Kill me, my faithful friends,

For in my being killed is my life.

Love is that you remain standing

In front of your Beloved

When you are stripped of all your attributes;

Then His attributes become your qualities.

Between me and You, there is only me.

Take away the me, so only You remain

—–

I am the One Whom I Love

I am He whom I love,

and He whom I love is I:

We are two spirits

dwelling in one body.

If thou seest me,

thou seest Him,

And if thou seest Him,

thou seest us both.

—–

The Sunrise Ruby

In the early morning hour,

just before dawn, lover and beloved wake

and take a drink of water.

She ask, “Do you love me or yourself more?

Really, tell the absolute truth.”

He says, “Theres nothing left of me.

Im like a ruby held up to the sunrise.

Is it still a stone, or a world

made of redness? It has no resistance

to sunlight.”

This is how Hallaj said, I am God,

and told the truth!

The ruby and the sunrise are one.

Be courageous and discipline yourself.

Completely become hearing and ear,

and wear this sun-ruby as an earring.

Work. Keep digging your well.

Dont think about getting off from work.

Water is there somewhere.

Submit to a daily practice.

Your loyalty to that

is a ring on the door.

Keep knocking, and the joy inside

will eventually open a window

and look out to see whos there.

——

HALLAJ

Hallaj said what he said and went to the origin

through the hoe in the scaffold.

I cut a cap’s worth of cloth from his robe,

and it swamped over me from head to foot.

Years ago, I broke a bunch of roses

from the top of his wall. A torn from that

is still in my palm working deeper.

From Hallaj, I learned to hunt ions,

but I became something hungrier than a lion.

I was a frisky colt. He broke me

with a quiet hand on the side of my head.

A person comes to him naked. It’s cold.

There’s a fur coat floating in the river.

“Jump in and get it,” he says.

You dive in. You reach for the coat.

It reaches for you.

It’s a live bear that has fallen in upstream,

drifting with the current.

“How long does it take!” Hallaj yells from the bank.

“Don’t wait,” you answer. “This coat

has decided to wear me home!”

A little part of a story, a hint.

Do you need long sermons on Hallaj!

—-

Al Hallaj says about God:

“Before” does not outstrip Him,

“after” does not interrupt Him

“of” does not vie with Him for precedence

“from” does not accord with Him

“to” does not join with Him

“in” does not inhabit Him

“when” does not stop Him

“if” does not consult with Him

“over” does not overshadow

Him “under” does not support Him

“opposite” does not face Him

“with” does not press Him

“behind” does not limit Him

“previous” does not display Him

“after” does not cause Him to pass away

“all” does not unite Him

“is” does not bring Him into being

“is not” does not deprive Him from Being.

Concealment does not veil Him

His pre-existence preceded time,

His being preceded non-being,

His eternity preceded limit.

If thou sayest ‘when’,

His existing has outstripped time;

If thou sayest ‘before’, before is after Him;

If thou sayest ‘he’, ‘h’ and ‘e’ are His creation;

If thou sayest ‘how’, His essence is veiled from description;

If thou sayest ‘where’, His being preceded space;

If thou sayest ‘ipseity’ (ma huwa),

His ipseity (huwiwah) is apart from things.

Other than He cannot

be qualified by two (opposite) qualities at

one time; yet With Him they do not create opposition.

He is hidden in His manifestation,

manifest in His concealing.

He is outward and inward,

near and far; and in this respect He is

removed beyond the resemblance of creation.

He acts without contact,

instructs without meeting,

guides without pointing.

Desires do not conflict with Him,

thoughts do not mingle with Him:

His essence is without qualification (takyeef),

His action without effort (takleef).

—-

“I saw my Lord with the Eye of my heart,

And I said: Truly there is no doubt that it is You.

It is You that I see in everything;

And I do not see You through anything (but You).

You are the One Who owns all places.

And yet no place is You.

And if there were a place given by You for the place,

That place would know where You are.

And if there were an imagination for the imagining of You.

That imagination would know where You are.

I understand everything, and everything that I see

In my annihilation is You.

My Lord, bless me and forgive me,

For I seek no one but You.”

—-

He was born around 858 in Tur, Persia to a cotton-carder (Hallaj means “cotton-carder” in Arabic). Al-Hallaj’s grandfather may have been a Zoroastrian. His father lived a simple life, and this form of lifestyle greatly interested the young al-Hallaj. As a youngster he memorized the Qur’an and would often retreat from worldly pursuits to join other mystics in study.

Hallaj would later marry and make a pilgrimage to Mecca, where he stayed for one year, facing the mosque, in fasting and total silence. After his stay at the holy city, he traveled extensively and wrote and taught along the way. He travelled as far as India and Central Asia gaining many followers, many of which accompanied him on his second and third trips to Mecca. After this period of travel, he settled down in the Abbasid capital of Baghdad.

During his early lifetime he was a disciple of Junayd and Amr al-Makki, but was later rejected by them both.

Among other Sufis, Hallaj was an anomaly. Many Sufi masters felt that it was inappropriate to share mysticism with the masses, yet Hallaj openly did so in his writings and through his teachings. He would begin to make enemies, and the rulers saw him as a threat.This was exacerbated by times when he would fall into trances which he attributed to being in the presence of God. During one of these trances, he would utter Ana al-Haqq أنا الحق, meaning “I am the Truth,” or “I am God” and also, “In my turban is wrapped nothing but God?” which was taken to mean that he was claiming to be God, as Al-Haqq is one of the Ninety Nine Names of Allah. In another statement, Hallaj would point to his cloak and say, “Maa Fil Jubbati Illa-Allah” meaning “There is nothing inside/underneath the cloak except God.”

This utterance would lead him to a long trial, and subsequent imprisonment for eleven years in a Baghdad prison. In the end, he would be tortured and publicly crucified (in some accounts he was beheaded and his hands and feet were cut off) by the Abbasid rulers for what they deemed “theological error threatening the security of the state.” Many accounts tell of Al-Hallaj’s calm demeanor even while he was being tortured, and indicate that he forgave those who had executed him. According to some sources, he went to his execution dancing in his chains. He died on March 26, 922.

_________

The Execution of al-Hallaj

—–

When all visible light is extinguished, one finds the light of the self.”

– The Upanishads

“The Sun of the One I love has risen in the night,

Resplendent, and there will be no more sunset…

I saw my Lord with the eye of the heart, and I

said “Who are you?” and he said, “Your Self.”

– Al Hallâj

—-

A short note…

A big hello to Graham in London, and to Doug as well. A hello out to my sister Rebecca, and Deva.

Lots to read, the mind is wandering a bit. Summer is coming on so nicely. Beauty abounds.

Have a sweet Day.

Gwyllm

—

On The Menu:

The Links

On The Month of May

The Articles: The Horned Women &amp; The Fairy Dance

The Poetry: LI T’AI-PO

The Art: Arthur Rackham

Arthur Rackham was born September 19, 1867, in London, England. He studied at the Lambeth School of Art, was elected to membership in The Royal Watercolour Society and the Société Nationale des Beaux Arts, and became Master of the Art Workers’ Guild. Books he illustrated included Rip van Winkle (1905), The Ingoldsby Legends (1906), Alice in Wonderland (1907), and many other children’s books and classics throughout the years until his death in 1939. His last work, for The Wind in the Willows, was published posthumously. He won gold medals at Milan (1906) and Barcelona (1911), and his books and original art are now collected in many countries throughout the world.

“In imagination, draftsmanship and colour-blending, his work stands alone. His deep understanding of the spirit of myth, fable, and folklore affords him a transcendent range of expression.” [Arthur Rackham, a Bibliography, by Sarah Briggs Latimore and Grace Clark Haskell, Los Angeles, Suttonhouse, 1936]

Rackham has been called “the leading decorative illustrator of the Edwardian period…. We see him…. in 1905 at the outset of twenty years of the most prolific and prosperous creative work ever enjoyed by an English illustrator.” [Arthur Rackham, His Life and Work, by Derek Hudson, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1960]

“Rackham’s illustrations to Grimm, Hans Andersen or Poe show him at his most imaginative and observant of human nature, while his gnomes, fairies and gnarled anthropomorphic trees in Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens or A Midsummer Night’s Dream represent his more fantastic side…. He was – and remains – a soloist in front of an orchestra, a player with the responsibility to interpret and add a personal lustre to great works with variations of infinite subtlety and grace.” [Arthur Rackham: A Life with Illustration, by James Hamilton, Pavilion Books, Ltd., London, 1990; published in New York by Arcade Publishing, Inc. as Arthur Rackham, A Biography]

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_________

The Links:

MORPHIC FIELDS AND MORPHIC RESONANCE

Fishermen find Utah Lake Monster

A Vast New Map of the Universe

_________

On May

O Day after day we can’t help growing older.

Year after year spring can’t help seeming younger.

Come let’s enjoy our winecup today,

Nor pity the flowers fallen.

– Wang Wei, On Parting with Spring

—-

May is a pious fraud of the almanac.

– James R. Lowell, 1819 – 1891

—-

‘Sap which mounts, and flowers which thrust,

Your childhood is a bower:

Let my fingers wander in the moss

Where glows the rosebud

—–

‘Let me among the clean grasses

Drink the drops of dew

Which sprinkle the tender flower, –

– Paul Verlaine, Spring

—–

Spring – An experience in immortality.

– Henry D. Thoreau

—–

The year is ended, and it only adds to my age;

Spring has come, but I must take leave of my home.

Alas, that the trees in this easter garden,

Without me, will still bear flowers.

– Su Ting, circa 700AD

______________

___________

From Old Ireland: The Horned Women

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 the 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 the 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 Slieve-namon, 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 the 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 cross-beam 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 tree and beam!” they cried to the door.

“I cannot,” said the door; “for the beam is fixed in the jambs arid 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 Slieve-namon, 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.

________

_________

From Old Ireland: The Fairy Dance

THE following story is from the Irish, as told by a native of one of the Western Isles, where the primitive superstitions have still all the freshness of young life.

One evening late in November, which is the month when spirits have most power over all things, as the prettiest girl in all the island was going to the well for water, her foot slipped and she fell, it was an unlucky omen, and when she got up and looked round it seemed to her as if she were in a strange place, and all around her was changed as if by enchantment. But at some distance she saw a great crowd gathered round a blazing fire, and she was drawn slowly on towards them, till at last she stood in the very midst of the people; but they kept silence, looking fixedly at her; and she was afraid, and tried to turn and leave them, but she could not. Then a beautiful youth, like a prince, with a red sash, and a golden band on his long yellow hair, came up and asked her to dance.

“It is a foolish thing of you, sir, to ask me to dance,” she said, “when there is no music.”

Then he lifted his hand and made a sign to the people, and instantly the sweetest music sounded near her and around her, and the young man took her hand, and they danced and danced till the moon and the stars went down, but she seemed like one floating on the air, and she forgot everything in the world except the dancing, and the sweet low music, and her beautiful partner.

At last the dancing ceased, and her partner thanked her, and invited her to supper with the company. Then she saw an opening in the ground, and a flight of steps, and the young man, who seemed to be the king amongst them all, led her down, followed by the whole company. At the end of the stairs they came upon a large hall, all bright and beautiful with gold and silver and lights; and the table was covered with everything good to eat, and wine was poured out in golden cups for them to drink. When she sat down they all pressed her to eat the food and to drink the wine; and as she was weary after the dancing, she took the golden cup the prince handed to her, and raised it to her lips to drink. Just then, a man passed close to her, and whispered–

“Eat no food, and drink no wine, or you will never reach your home again.”

So she laid down the cup, and refused to drink. On this they were angry, and a great noise arose, and a fierce, dark man stood up, and said–

“Whoever comes to us must drink with us.”

And he seized her arm, and held the wine to her lips, so that she almost died of fright. But at that moment a red-haired man came up, and he took her by the hand and led her out.

“You are safe for this time,” he said. “Take this herb, and hold it in your hand till you reach home, and no one can harm you.” And he gave her a branch of a plant called the Athair-Luss (the ground ivy). [a]

This she took, and fled away along the sward in the dark night; but all the time she heard footsteps behind her in pursuit. At last she reached home and barred the door, and went to bed, when a great clamour arose outside, and voices were heard crying to her–

“The power we had over you is gone through the magic of the herb; but wait–when you dance again to the music on the hill, you will stay with us for evermore, and none shall hinder.”

However, she kept the magic branch safely, and the fairies never troubled her more; but it was long and long before the sound of the fairy music left her ears which she had danced to that November night on the hillside with her fairy lover.

[a] In Ancient Egypt the ivy was sacred to Osiris, and a safeguard against evil.

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Poetry: LI T’AI-PO

SHE SPINS SILK

Far up river in Szechuan,

waters rise as spring winds roar.

How can I dare to meet her now,

to brave the dangerous gorge?

The grass grows green in the valley below

where silk worms silently spin.

Her hands work threads that never end,

dawn to dusk when the cuckoo sings.

—

IN THE MOUNTAINS ON A SUMMER DAY

Gently I stir a white feather fan,

With open shirt sitting in a green wood.

I take off my cap and hang it on a jutting stone;

A wind from the pine-tree trickles on my bare head.

—-

WATERFALL AT LU-SHAN

Sunlight streams on the river stones.

From high above, the river steadily plunges —

three thousand feet of sparkling water —

the Milky Way pouring down from heaven.

—–

TO TU FU FROM SHANTUNG

You ask how I spend my time —

I nestle against a treetrunk

and listen to autumn winds

in the pines all night and day.

Shantung wine can’t get me drunk.

The local poets bore me.

My thoughts remain with you,

like the Wen River, endlessly flowing.

—-

SELF-ABANDONMENT

I sat drinking and did not notice the dusk,

Till falling petals filled the folds of my dress.

Drunken I rose and walked to the moonlit stream;

The birds were gone, and men also few.

______

LI T’AI-PO

701 – 762

Chinese Poet

Poetry was the most celebrated art during the golden age of the Tang dynasty. The collection of Tang poetry included 48,000 poems written by 2,000 poets. Li T’ai-Po ranks together with his friend Tu-Fu as the greatest Chinese poet and one of the greatest poet’s in world history.

Li Tai-po was one of the most popular poets during the T’ang dynasty. His lyrics are characterized by spontaneity and vivid imagination. He was a pleasure lover. He drank continually, travelled a good deal and used to stand in drunken amazement on arched bridges and among the ruins of ancient palaces where he would conjure up the past before his minds eye. Popular legend has it that he drowned when, sitting drunk in a boat, he attempted to seize the moon’s reflection in the water. So even his death became a poem.

_________

Exit now, through here….

Tomorrow?

Gwyllm

On The Music Box: Steve Roach, Strata…

Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling the potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.

– Allan Watts

______

First off, a big hello to our friend Vera down in California, and to Nestor just around the corner. Thanks for reaching out to me on Monday. You both were there just in time!

I also want to thank all who have written lately excited about what has shown up on Turfing.

Hot Days in Portland, some 95f Monday in some areas. I was going for a run and thought better of it. I worked for 6 hours on The Invisible College only to find I had blown the whole thing. I tend to over complicate things, like repeatedly. Back to the drawing board!

Todays’ entry is somewhat influenced by “Memoirs of a Geisha”, which we watched over the last couple of days. Wonderful film. Seeing the film reminded me of my early love for Koans, so the poetry wanders in that general direction.

I must wander off now, it is late nearing Midnight.

Bright Blessings…

Gwyllm

______

On The Grill:

The Links

The Article: THE BOREAL CROWN and THE DOWNFALL OF CIVILIZATION

The Poetry: Daoist &amp; Zen… from back when…

The Art: for some of the illustrations: The Floating World…

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The Links:

The Boys in Blue are protecting you!

Images of the unexpected…

DWARF DRACULA KNEE-HIGH ANKLE BITER TERRORIZING SEATTLE!

White Line Fever???

Dr. Toon: Dis-band-ed

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THE BOREAL CROWN and THE DOWNFALL OF CIVILIZATION

by Anonymous

In 1808 the illuminated theorist and “Utopian Socialist” Charles Fourier launched the first fullyrealized and consciously revolutionary attack on CIVILIZATION by publishing his Theory of the Four Movements in France. No one noticed — any more than anyone noticed the books of William Blake, the only thinker of the era comparable to Fourier. In this brief text we cannot attempt a full report of Fourier´s brilliant utopian system of society, which he called HARMONY. But we could at least recall his programme involved the reorganization of human life into large groups, called Phalanxes, arranged in “Series” according to “Attraction” — that is, according to shared “Passions”. For Fourier, Passion was the sole possible organizing principe for utopian life. In brief: if everyone were free always to do exactly what they desire, all reason for social discord would vanish. Scarcity of any good — material, spiritual, erotic — can only be artificially imposed on society by CIVILIZATON, For Nature is naturally “generous”. Marriage, poverty, work, morality, loneliness, alienation, violence, boredom — these civilized miseries constitute the perverse results of a system which benefits a few at the expense of the health of Earth herself.

Fourier believed not only that humans are the desiring subjects of a desirable object (i.e., Terrestial Harmony), but also that the Earth and all other celestial bodies (planets, stars, etc.) are also living, sentient, desiring beings. The “force of attraction” that holds the universe(s) together can only be described as Passion, Erotic desire organizes not only the microcosm of human society but also the macrocosm (e.g., our solar system) in mandala of Harmony — the “Lineaments of gratified desire” as Blake would say.

Thus everything, quite literally everything, is moved solely by erotic attraction. In Harmony we shall work only at that which satisfies a Passion — and we shall be free to choose “Attractive Labor” — and since humans are inherently oassionate beings, Harmonian economics will replace the illusion of scarcity with the reality of super-abundance. Everyone will be “rich. Everyone will eat like a 18th century french gourmet (but the food will be healthy because it will be prepared according to the Harmonian science of Gastrosophy) — and everyone will enjoy at least “utopian minimum” of erotic pleasure. This immense intensification of animal/animate life will soon produce beneficial mutations even of the human body: — we shall need only a few hours of sleep per night, we shall grow taller and more beautiful, and within a few generations we shall each have a tail with an extra “hand” at the tip, and an extra eye in the palm of the hand . Moreover the climate will change and the seas will turn something like lemonade. Most of these changes will occur not through evolution and its endless eons, but almost immediatly, spontaneously, virtually overnight — as soon as we abandon CIVILIZATION and institute HARMONY in its stead.

One reason why these changes will occur so rapidly can be explained by the fact that Civilization has literally knocked Earth out of its true position in the cosmos. normally, since stars and planets are sexual beings, they enjoy sexual intercourse. Their sex organs — so to speak — consist of great cosmic rays (which Fourier calls “aromal rays”); celestial bodies project these rays at one another and thereby experiencethe bliss of fertilizing potency of erotic contact. In former times Earth also possessed an aromal ray and enjoyed its benefits — which manifested in the peace and plenty, gender harmony and sexual freedom of the hunting/gathering (or gardening) economy of the Old Stone Age. But Civilization disrupted the aromal ray. Earth lost its orgasmic potential. As Wilhelm Reich would put it, Earth was cut off from the cosmic source of orgone energy; Civilization equals sexual repression and erotic scarcity.

Now clearly, if human society were to overcome the malign local effect of civilization and institute the Harmonial Era, our planet would at once recover its cosmic sexuality and its aromal ray. Immediatly Earth would bathed again the perfume or illumination or jizm of the stars. Revivifying effects would begin to appear almost at once, and the initial eforts of the first Harmonians would be rewarded a thousand-fold through the vast new reservoirs or cosmic energy now available via Earth aromal ray.

in Theory of the Four Movements Fourier also revealed that Earth´s aromal ray — or rather its shattered fragments and dispersed remnants — can still be seen in the polar aurorae. the Northern and the Southern Lights (Aurora Borealis and Australis) resemble torn curtains of light. No Wonder! At one time they constituted coherent rays of brilliant color abd scebt which penetrated the yoni of the aether like an infinite lingam, and served as the pathway and vaginal gate for the infusion of subtle illumination-juices from everywhere in the multiverse. [ Incidentelly, this theory could be used to suggest that UFO´s are not extraterrestrial but consist in fact of local manifestations of “deadly orgone”, just as Reich feared]

Now it has occured to us that if the downfall of Civilization and the establishment of Harmony would result in the restauration of the “Boreal Crown” (as Fourier called it) to full coherence, then perhaps the opposite might also prove true. THE RESTAURATION OF THE BOREAL CROWN MIGHT RESULT IN THE DOWNFALL OF CIVILIZATION AND THE TRIUMPH OF HARMONY.

We believe it´s worth trying . But the big question facing us is — obviously — how? How does one go about repairing the Aurora Borealis?! If we knew the answer to the question we´d simply go and do it. The purpose of this text is to share our findings so far and to propose a framework for future research and action. We are convinced that this project will necesserly involve a certain amount of coordinated action by a great many people. We envision participation at many levels. Moreover, wehave no intention of acting as the center of this participation. We prefer to remain anonymous, and it is possible that our specific actions will be carried out more-or-less clandestinely. We will publish no address; so if you want to share ideas with us please send texts to the publication in which this communique appears – or else find out who we are by word of mouth and contact us directly.

So far, we have arrived at the following understanding. The popular aurorae are connected in some way with the with the magnetic poles rather than the geographic poles. The North Magnetic Pole is currently the more accessible of the two, since it is currently moving very slowly across northern Canada. As of this writing it is near Barthurst Island. The latitude of peak auroral activity is actually described by an oval ring whos center is a few degrees off the magnetic pole inthe direction of midnight. [See maps -Ed.]. The lights glow most intensely during magnetic storms, caused by an increase in the solar wind interacting with Earth´smagnetic field. At such times the auroral oval grows both southwards and toward the pole. The greatest auroral activity occurs at the peaks of the eleven-year sun-spot cycle, one of which, unfortunately, has just passed in the last year or two. It should be possible, nonetheless, to determine certain times and spacesat which our chance of acting on the Boreal Crown would be optimal. For example, if we determined that our action should take place at the magnetic place, we would calculate a time when weather conditions and geomagnetic activity would coincide to offer a maximal “window of opportunity”. If we decided that our actions should occur within the auroral oval, then a different set of space/time parameters would come into play.

Besides the questions of time and place we also face the question of effective action. At present we believe that we should consider the probable necessity of installing one or more “aromal devices” at one or more key points connected with the auroral/magnetic activity. These aromal devicesshould be concidered “machines” for the repair and restoration of the Boreal Crown. At present we remain uncertain aboutthe design of such devices; but we intend to uild at least one, and to install it at the chosen time and place. We hope that other groups and individuals will work on their own theories and also produce their own devices. Then, when a time and place have been determined, we will make this information publicly known. We will proceed to carry out an expedition, let´s say, to the Magnetic North Pole, timed to arrive at a certain day or period of days. We hope that others will launch their own simultaneous expeditions and that we will all rendezvous at the appointed moment and location. There and then we will carry out all our planned installation, actions, rituals, etc., together, inthe context of FESTIVAL.

Obviously a certain element of psychic technology enters into this project — and it is precisly on this psychic and “astral” level that many wish to participate in the action. Energy can be added to the activities of the Arctic expeditions (and to the acual installations or aromal devices) by the though projections and sympathetic actions of supporters and well-wishers all over the globe. We consider the possibility of a GENERAL STRIKE on the day of the festival, as the vital component of the operation. Everyone who cannot be with us at the installation of the site can carry out some symbolic and/or material action against Civilization, against Work, against oppression, boredom and alienation. This might consist of nothing more than wearing a symbol of the Festival (button, badge, flower, color, scent, etc.). Some participiants might simply wish to take a day off work and loll around, thinking about the Northern Lights. Group might want to organize actuall strikes or demonstrations against miseries of Civilization, and in favor for Attractive Labor or the Utopian Minimum. Artists and creative groups might errect sympathetic installations or perform supportive rituals, whereever they might happan to be at the appointed hour.

Our project at present calls for the further refinement of all these ideas, and for their widesat possible dissemination. These tasks are perhaps best carried out by many groups and individuáls simultaneously and more-or-less anonymously, so that the best ideas and images will have a chance to circulate by word of mouth and by various informal networks. In this way they will have a chance to take a life on their own and to circulate under their own power, so to speak, in anatural, organic manner. In order to succeed this Festival and General Strike needs to belong to everyone and anyone. Already this text is the product of a group — a group that believes that its ideas will sink or soar solely according to the degree of Attraction they radiate. The one central idea of the idea is the restorationof the Boreal Crown to its primordial coherence as Earth´s aromal ray; around this center the event must come into being spontaneously, like the mandala of a snowflake, like atrue holiday, like an uprising. The evnt therefore, must create itself.

We might, however, speculate in more detail about our vision of the aromal device or machine for repairing Aurora. Certain themes have already been touched on, and we expcet the full structure of the device to precipitate and crystallize around this or other related themes: Magnetism, the Sun, the Earth´s magnetotail, magnets (the first compass was amagnetized needle floated in water), “animal magnetism”, sexual attraction, sexual fluids, aromas, perfumes, colors, lights, the North, the Arctic, hunting, gardening, the Old Age, night, stars, te North Star, the Moon (measurement of time), clocks, gold, crystal, ice, rays, coherent light, curtains and ribbons of light, heraldic emblems (symbols of the events) such as flowers, colors, geometric shapes, hieroglyphs, banners, music, dance, ritual, arctic shamanism, the Millennium, the end of Civilization, restoration of Harmony, peace, brilliance, delicious food and drink, transformation, the esoteric, the clandestine, the hidden, mutation, orgy, the erotic manias, performance, opera, alchemy, the mythology and the folkloire of the Northern Lights, mental energy, the visualization of coherent light as aroma, energy from the stars, orgone, blue, mirrors, maps, invocations…….

Imagine a “machine” with such “moving parts”, miniaturized to the size of a small box, taken to the North Pole, installed — and activated. Imagine it as a focus for the concentrated desire of a world sickened by Civilization — work, oppression — a vast desire channeled into one image: the Boreal Crown in full glory — and one goal: the downfall of Civilization. In combination: a Festival of Light.

– Anonymous

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Poetry: Daoist &amp; Zen… from back when…

Returning to form today. Some of my earliest poetic readings were Japanese Koans, via Mr. Suzuki’s most excellent book: “Zen Flesh, Zen Bones. I haunted the local Japanese import store when I was a young one. It was as close as I could get to the culture at that point.

The pieces I have selected today are some of my old favourites, from the Zen and Daoist Traditions. I hope you enjoy.

Gwyllm

—

Bitter rain soaks the pile of kindling twigs.

The night so cold and still the lamp flame hardly moves.

Clouds condense and drench our stone walled hut.

Broken rushes clog the reed gate’s way.

The stream gurgles, a torrent in its bed.

That’s all we hear. Only rarely, comes a human voice…

But oh, how priceless is this peace of mind that fills us

As we sit on our heels and put on another Chan monk’s robe!

– Bitter Rain by Master Hsu Yun

—

There is a reality even prior to heaven and earth;

Indeed, it has no form, much less a name;

Eyes fail to see it;

It has no voice for ears to detect;

To call it Mind or Buddha violates its nature,

For it then becomes like a visionary flower in the air;

It is not Mind, nor Buddha;

Absolutely quiet, and yet illuminating in a mysterious way,

It allows itself to be perceived only by the clear-eyed.

– Daio Kokushi, 1232 – 1308, On Zen

—

In the awakened eye

Mountains and rivers

Completely disappear.

The eye of delusion

Gazes upon

Deep fog and clouds.

Alone in my zazen

I forget the days

As they pass.

The wisteria has grown

Thick over the eaves

Of my hut.

– Muso (1275-1351)

—

Asking without knowing.

Answering, still not understanding.

The moon is cold, the wind is high–

On the ancient cliff, frigid juniper.

How delightful: on the road,

He met a man who had attained the Path.

And didn’t use speech or silence to reply.

His hand grasps the white jade whip.

And smashes the black dragon’s pearl.

If he hadn’t smashed it,

He would have increased its flaws.

– Hsueh-tou (980-1052), Roaring Stream

(Stéphane Mallarmé painted by Manet)

This edition of Turfing is dedicated to my friend Morgan, whose revo/evolutionary spirit has deeply moved me over the years. He works incessantly with social/politcal/art issues, touching many lives. He always brings a fresh viewpoint, rooted well in historic and often humourous precedents. To know him is to love him!

As you can tell, Turfing has a new look. I am cracking the PHP code slowly but surely. Necessity is the Mother, I must tell you.

More later, working on The Invisible College and falling behind.

Hot today here in Portland. 90′s plus predicted.

Blessings,

Gwyllm

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On The Menu….

The Links

The Article: Power and Revolution: The Anarchist Century

Poetry: Stéphane Mallarmé

_____________

The Links:

‘Brazilian Stonehenge’ discovered

Born Into Cellblocks

Massive Attack – Special Cases

The musical Mr. Hatch…

Everything, is under Control

Wanted: a warning to last 10,000 years…

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Power and Revolution: The Anarchist Century

by Andrej Grubacic

{This paper is a revised version of the essay co-writen with David Graeber: Anarchism or the Revolutionary Movement for the 21st Century. It is revised and will be revised further for the presentation for the June 1 – 7 2006 Z Sessions on Vision and Strategy, held in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. }

(Jonathan Talbot, “Large Anarchist Patrin,” )

It is becoming increasingly clear that the age of revolutions is not over. It’s becoming equally clear that the global revolutionary movement in the twenty first century, will be one that traces its origins less to the tradition of Marxism, or even of socialism narrowly defined, but of anarchism.

Everywhere from Serbia to Argentina, from Seattle to Bombay, anarchist ideas and principles are generating new radical dreams and visions. Often their exponents do not call themselves “anarchists”. There are a host of other names: autonomism, anti-authoritarianism, horizontality, Zapatismo, direct democracy… Still, everywhere one finds the same core principles: decentralization, voluntary association, mutual aid, the network model, and above all, the rejection of any idea that the end justifies the means, let alone that the business of a revolutionary is to seize state power and then begin imposing one’s vision at the point of a gun. Above all, anarchism, as an ethics of practice-the idea of building a new society “within the shell of the old”-has become the basic inspiration of the “movement of movements”, which has from the start been less about seizing state power than about exposing, de-legitimizing and dismantling mechanisms of rule while winning ever-larger spaces of autonomy and participatory management within it.

There are some obvious reasons for the appeal of anarchist ideas at the beginning of the 21st century: most obviously, the failures and catastrophes resulting from so many efforts to overcome capitalism by seizing control of the apparatus of government in the 20th. Increasing numbers of revolutionaries have begun to recognize that “the revolution” is not going to come as some great apocalyptic moment, the storming of some global equivalent of the Winter Palace, but a very long process that has been going on for most of human history (even if it has like most things come to accelerate of late) full of strategies of flight and evasion as much as dramatic confrontations, and which will never-indeed, most anarchists feel, should never-come to a definitive conclusion.

It’s a little disconcerting, but it offers one enormous consolation: we do not have to wait until “after the revolution” to begin to get a glimpse of what genuine freedom might be like. Freedom only exists in the moment of revolution. And those moments are not as rare as you think. For an anarchist, in fact, to try to create non-alienated experiences, true democracy, is an ethical imperative; only by making one’s form of organization in the present at least a rough approximation of how a free society would actually operate, how everyone, someday, should be able to live, can one guarantee that we will not cascade back into disaster. Grim joyless revolutionaries who sacrifice all pleasure to the cause can only produce grim joyless societies.

These changes have been difficult to document because so far anarchist ideas have received almost no attention in the academy. There are still thousands of academic Marxists, but almost no academic anarchists. This lag is somewhat difficult to interpret. In part, no doubt, it’s because Marxism has always had a certain affinity with the academy which anarchism obviously lacked: Marxism was, after all, the only great social movement that was invented by a Ph.D. Most accounts of the history of anarchism assume it was basically similar to Marxism: anarchism is presented as the brainchild of certain 19th century thinkers (Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin…) that then went on to inspire working-class organizations, became enmeshed in political struggles, divided into sects…

Anarchism, in the standard accounts, usually comes out as Marxism’s poorer cousin, theoretically a bit flat-footed but making up for brains, perhaps, with passion and sincerity. Really the analogy is strained. The “founders” of anarchism did not think of themselves as having invented anything particularly new. The saw its basic principles-mutual aid, voluntary association, egalitarian decision-making-as as old as humanity. The same goes for the rejection of the state and of all forms of structural violence, inequality, or domination (anarchism literally means “without rulers”)-even the assumption that all these forms are somehow related and reinforce each other. None of it was seen as some startling new doctrine, but a longstanding tendency in the history human thought, and one that cannot be encompassed by any general theory of ideology.

On one level it is a kind of faith: a belief that most forms of irresponsibility that seem to make power necessary are in fact the effects of power itself. In practice though it is a constant questioning, an effort to identify every compulsory or hierarchical relation in human life, and challenge them to justify themselves, and if they cannot-which usually turns out to be the case-an effort to limit their power and thus widen the scope of human liberty. Just as a Sufi might say that Sufism is the core of truth behind all religions, an anarchist might argue that anarchism is the urge for freedom behind all political ideologies.

Schools of Marxism always have founders. Just as Marxism sprang from the mind of Marx, so we have Leninists, Maoists,, Althusserians… (Note how the list starts with heads of state and grades almost seamlessly into French professors – who, in turn, can spawn their own sects: Lacanians, Foucauldians….)

Schools of anarchism, in contrast, almost invariably emerge from some kind of organizational principle or form of practice: Anarcho-Syndicalists and Anarcho-Communists, Insurrectionists and Platformists, Cooperativists, Councilists, Individualists, and so on.

Anarchists are distinguished by what they do, and how they organize themselves to go about doing it. And indeed this has always been what anarchists have spent most of their time thinking and arguing about. They have never been much interested in the kinds of broad strategic or philosophical questions that preoccupy Marxists such as Are the peasants a potentially revolutionary class? (anarchists consider this something for peasants to decide) or what is the nature of the commodity form? Rather, they tend to argue about what is the truly democratic way to go about a meeting, at what point organization stops empowering people and starts squelching individual freedom. Is “leadership” necessarily a bad thing? Or, alternately, about the ethics of opposing power: What is direct action? Should one condemn someone who assassinates a head of state? When is it okay to throw a brick?

Marxism, then, has tended to be a theoretical or analytical discourse about revolutionary strategy. Anarchism has tended to be an ethical discourse about revolutionary practice. As a result, where Marxism has produced brilliant theories of praxis, it’s mostly been anarchists who have been working on the praxis itself.

At the moment, there’s something of a rupture between generations of anarchism: I would like to express my affinity with what might be loosely referred to as the “small-a anarchists”, who are, by now, by far the majority. But it is sometimes hard to tell, since so many of them do not trumpet their affinities very loudly. There are many. in fact, who take anarchist principles of anti-sectarianism and open-endedness so seriously that they refuse to refer to themselves as ‘anarchists’ for that very reason .

But the three essentials that run throughout all manifestations of anarchist movement are definitely there – anti-statism, anti-capitalism and prefigurative politics (i.e. modes of organization that consciously resemble the world you want to create. Or, as an anarchist historian of the revolution in Spain has formulated “an effort to think of not only the ideas but the facts of the future itself”. This is present in anything from jamming collectives and on to Indy media, all of which can be called anarchist in the newer sense.

The new anarchists are much more interested in developing new forms of practice than arguing about the finer points of ideology. The most dramatic among these have been the development of new forms of decision-making process, the beginnings, at least, of an alternate culture of democracy. The famous North American spokescouncils, where thousands of activists coordinate large-scale events by consensus, with no formal leadership structure, are only the most spectacular.

Actually, even calling these forms “new” is a little bit deceptive. One of the main inspirations for the new generation of anarchists are the Zapatista autonomous municipalities of Chiapas, based in Tzeltal or Tojolobal-speaking communities who have been using consensus process for thousands of years-only now adopted by revolutionaries to ensure that women and younger people have an equal voice. In North America, “consensus process” emerged more than anything else from the feminist movement in the ’70s, as part of a broad backlash against the macho style of leadership typical of the ’60s New Left. The idea of consensus itself was borrowed from the Quakers, who again, claim to have been inspired by the Six Nations and other Native American practices.

Consensus is often misunderstood. One often hears critics claim it would cause stifling conformity but almost never by anyone who has actually observed consensus in action, at least, as guided by trained, experienced facilitators (some recent experiments in Europe, where there is little tradition of such things, have been somewhat crude). In fact, the operating assumption is that no one could really convert another completely to their point of view, or probably should. Instead, the point of consensus process is to allow a group to decide on a common course of action. Instead of voting proposals up and down, proposals are worked and reworked, scotched or reinvented, there is a process of compromise and synthesis, until one ends up with something everyone can live with. When it comes to the final stage, actually “finding consensus”, there are two levels of possible objection: one can “stand aside”, which is to say “I don’t like this and won’t participate but I wouldn’t stop anyone else from doing it”, or “block”, which has the effect of a veto. One can only block if one feels a proposal is in violation of the fundamental principles or reasons for being of a group. One might say that the function which in the US constitution is relegated to the courts, of striking down legislative decisions that violate constitutional principles, is here relegated with anyone with the courage to actually stand up against the combined will of the group (though of course there are also ways of challenging unprincipled blocks).

One could go on at length about the elaborate and surprisingly sophisticated methods that have been developed to ensure all this works; of forms of modified consensus required for very large groups; of the way consensus itself reinforces the principle of decentralization by ensuring one doesn’t really want to bring proposals before very large groups unless one has to, of means of ensuring gender equity and resolving conflict… The point is this is a form of direct democracy which is very different than the kind we usually associate with the term-or, for that matter, with the kind of majority-vote system usually employed by anarchists in the past. With increasing contact between different movements internationally, the inclusion of indigenous groups and movements from Africa, Asia, and Oceania with radically different traditions, we are seeing the beginnings of a new global reconception of what “democracy” or “revolution” should even mean, one as far as possible from the neoliberal parlaimentarianism currently promoted by the existing powers of the world.

Again, it is difficult to follow this new spirit of synthesis by reading most existing anarchist literature, because those who spend most of their energy on questions of theory, rather than emerging forms of practice, are the most likely to maintain the old sectarian dichotomizing logic. Modern anarchism is imbued with countless contradictions. While small-a anarchists are slowly incorporating ideas and practices learned from indigenous allies into their modes of organizing or alternative communities, the main trace in the written literature has been the emergence of a sect of Primitivists, a notoriously contentious crew who call for the complete abolition of industrial civilization, and, in some cases, even agriculture. Still, it is only a matter of time before this older, either/or logic begins to give way to something more resembling the practice of consensus-based groups.

What would this new synthesis look like? Some of the outlines can already be discerned within the movement. It will insist on constantly expanding the focus of anti-authoritarianism, moving away from class reductionism by trying to grasp the “totality of domination”, that is, to highlight not only the state but also gender relations, and not only the economy but also cultural relations and ecology, sexuality, and freedom in every form it can be sought, and each not only through the sole prism of authority relations, but also informed by richer and more diverse concepts.

This approach does not call for an endless expansion of material production, or hold that technologies are neutral, but it also doesn’t decry technology per se. Instead, it becomes familiar with and employs diverse types of technology as appropriate. It not only doesn’t decry institutions per se, or political forms per se, it tries to conceive new institutions and new political forms for activism and for a new society, including new ways of meeting, new ways of decision making, new ways of coordinating, along the same lines as it already has with revitalized affinity groups and spokes structures. And it not only doesn’t decry reforms per se, but struggles to define and win non-reformist reforms, attentive to people’s immediate needs and bettering their lives in the here-and-now at the same time as moving toward further gains, and eventually, wholesale transformation. It rejects the very opposition between reformism and revolution.

(Yves Tanguy)

And of course theory will have to catch up with practice. The problem at the moment is that anarchists who want to get past old-fashioned, vanguardist habits-the Marxist sectarian hangover that still haunts so much of the radical intellectual world-are not quite sure what their role is supposed to be. Anarchism needs to become reflexive. But how? On one level the answer seems obvious. One should not lecture, not dictate, not even necessarily think of oneself as a teacher, but must listen, explore and discover. To tease out and make explicit the tacit logic already underlying new forms of radical practice. To put oneself at the service of activists by providing information, or exposing the interests of the dominant elite carefully hidden behind supposedly objective, authoritative discourses, rather than trying to impose a new version of the same thing. How to move from ethnography to utopian visions-ideally, as many utopian visions as possible? It is hardly a coincidence that some of the greatest recruiters for anarchism in countries like the United States have been feminist science fiction writers like Starhawk or Ursula K. LeGuin.

One way this is beginning to happen is as anarchists begin to recuperate the experience of other social movements with a more developed body of theory, ideas that come from circles close to, indeed inspired by anarchism. Let’s take for example the idea of participatory economy, which represents an anarchist economist vision par excellence and which supplements and rectifies anarchist economic tradition. Parecon theorists argue for the existence of not just two, but three major classes in advanced capitalism: not only a proletariat and bourgeoisie but a “coordinator class” whose role is to manage and control the labor of the working class. This is the class that includes the management hierarchy and the professional consultants and advisors central to their system of control – as lawyers, key engineers and accountants, and so on. They maintain their class position because of their relative monopolization over knowledge, skills, and connections. As a result, economists and others working in this tradition have been trying to create models of an economy which would systematically eliminate divisions between physical and intellectual labor. Now that anarchism has so clearly become the center of revolutionary creativity, proponents of such models have increasingly been, if not rallying to the flag, exactly, then at least, emphasizing the degree to which their ideas are compatible with an anarchist vision.

This doesn’t mean anarchists have to be against theory. It might not need High Theory, in the sense familiar today. Certainly it will not need one single, Anarchist High Theory. That would be completely inimical to its spirit. Much better, I think, something more in the spirit of anarchist decision-making processes: applied to theory, this would mean accepting the need for a diversity of high theoretical perspectives, united only by certain shared commitments and understandings. Rather than based on the need to prove others’ fundamental assumptions wrong, it seeks to find particular projects on which they reinforce each other. Just because theories are incommensurable in certain respects does not mean they cannot exist or even reinforce each other, any more than the fact that individuals have unique and incommensurable views of the world means they cannot become friends, or lovers, or work on common projects. Even more than High Theory, what anarchism needs is what might be called low theory: a way of grappling with those real, immediate questions that emerge from a transformative project.

Similar things are starting to happen with the development of anarchist political visions. Now, this is an area where classical anarchism already had a leg up over classical Marxism, which never developed a theory of political organization at all. Different schools of anarchism have often advocated very specific forms of social organization, albeit often markedly at variance with one another. Still, anarchism as a whole has tended to advance what liberals like to call ‘negative freedoms,’ ‘freedoms from,’ rather than substantive ‘freedoms to.’ Often it has celebrated this very commitment as evidence of anarchism’s pluralism, ideological tolerance, or creativity. But as a result, there has been a reluctance to go beyond developing small-scale forms of organization, and a faith that larger, more complicated structures can be improvised later in the same spirit.

There have been exceptions, such as the North American Social Ecologists’s “libertarian municipalism”. There’s a lively debate developing, for instance, on how to balance principles of worker’s control-emphasized by the Parecon folk-and direct democracy, emphasized by the Social Ecologists.

Still, there are a lot of details still to be filled in: what are the anarchist’s full sets of positive institutional alternatives to contemporary legislatures, courts, police, and diverse executive agencies? Obviously there could never be an anarchist party line on this, the general feeling among the small-a anarchists at least is that we’ll need many concrete visions and many utopian dialogues. Still, between actual social experiments within expanding self-managing, ungoverned communities in places like Eastern Europe or Latin America, and of the efforts of new anarchists all over the globe, the work is beginning. It is clearly a long-term process. But then, the anarchist century has only just begun.

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Poetry: Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898)

SEA-WIND

The flesh is sad, alas! and all the books are read.

Flight, only flight! I feel that birds are wild to tread

The floor of unknown foam, and to attain the skies!

Nought, neither ancient gardens mirrored in the eyes,

Shall hold this heart that bathes in waters its delight,

O nights! nor yet my waking lamp, whose lonely light

Shadows the vacant paper, whiteness profits best,

Nor the young wife who rocks her baby on her breast.

I will depart! O steamer, swaying rope and spar,

Lift anchor for exotic lands that lie afar!

A weariness, outworn by cruel hopes, still clings

To the last farewell handkerchief’s last beckonings!

And are not these, the masts inviting storms, not these

That an awakening wind bends over wrecking seas,

Lost, not a sail, a sail, a flowering isle, ere long?

But, O my heart, hear thou, hear thou, the sailors’ song!

————

Anxiety

Her pure nails sprung up exalting their onyx,

Anxiety, this midnight, bearing light, sustains,

In twilight many dreams burnt up by the Phoenix

Whose scattered ashes no sepulchral urn contains

Atop the sideboards, in the empty room: no ptyx,

That voided toy of vibrant nonsense, left inside,

(Because the Master went to draw the tears from Styx

With that exclusive object wherein Naught takes pride.)

In vacant north seen through the casement frames, a gold

May agonize at times, within the setting, to behold

Fire-breathing unicorns arrayed against a nix,

She, lifeless naked mirror image, repetition

Whom in the twinkling framed forgetting, is to fix

Through sparkling timed in septet, composition.

————

Apparition

La lune s’attristait. Des séraphins en pleurs

Rêvant, l’archet aux doigts, dans le calme des fleurs

Vaporeuses, tiraient de mourantes violes

De blancs sanglots glissant sur l’azur des corolles.

—C’était le jour béni de ton premier baiser.

Ma songerie aimant à me martyriser

s’enivrait savamment du parfum de tristesse

Que même sans regret et sans déboire laisse

La cueillaison d’un Rêve au coeur qui l’a cueilli.

J’errais donc, l’oeil rivé sur le pavé vieilli

Quand avec du soleil aux cheveux, dans la rue

Et dans le soir, tu m’es en riant apparue

Et j’ai cru voir la fée au chapeau de clarté

Qui jadis sur mes beaux sommeils d’enfant gâté

Passait, laissant toujours de ses mains mal fermées

Neiger de blancs bouquets d’étoiles parfumées.

————-

The Faun

Those nymphs, I want to perpetuate them.

So bright,

Their light rosy flesh, that it hovers in the air

Drowsy with tangled slumbers.

Did I love a dream?

My doubt, hoard of ancient night, is crowned

In many a subtle branch, which, remaining the true

Woods themselves, proves, alas! that alone I offered

Myself as a triumph the perfect sin of roses.

Let us reflect …

or whether the women you describe

Represent a desire of your fabulous senses!

Faun, the illusion flows from the cold blue eyes

Of the most chaste like a spring of tears:

But the other, all sighs, do you say she contrasts

Like the warm day’s breeze in your fleece?

But no! through the still and weary rapture

Stifling the cool morning with heat should it struggle,

No water murmurs unless poured by my flute

On the thicket sprinkled with melody; and the

Only wind, quick to escape the twin pipes before

Scattering the sound in an arid rain, is,

On the smooth untroubled surface of the horizon,

The visible and serene artificial breath

Of inspiration returning to the sky.

————-

ONE TOSS OF THE DICE

NEVER

NOT EVEN WHEN CAST IN ETERNAL

CIRCUMSTANCES

FROM THE DEPTHS OF A SHIPWRECK

WHETHER

the

Abyss

whitened

becalmed

furious

under an inclination

glides desperately

with wing

its own

in advance refallen with a difficulty in setting up flight

and covering the outpourings

cutting utterly the leaps

very interiorly resumes

the shade buried in the deep by that alternative sail

as to adapt

to its wingspan

its gaping depth as the hull

of a vessel

tilted to one or the other side

THE MASTERoutside old calculations

where the maneuver with age forgotten

arisen

inferringlong ago he grasped the helm

of that conflagration at his feet

of the unanimous horizon

there is preparing

stirring and mixing

in the fist that might clutch it

as one menaces a destiny and the winds

the unique Number which cannot be another

Spirit

to hurl it

in the tempest

refolding the division and passing proud

hesitates

a corpse by the arm set apart from the secret it keeps

rather

than to play

like a hoary maniac

the game

in the name of waves

one invades the chief

flows like a submissive beard

shipwreck that direct from man

sans ship

no matter

where vain

ancestrally to not open the hand

clenched

beyond the useless head

legacy in the disappearance

to someone

ambiguous

the last immemorial demon

having

from null regions

induced

the old man towards this supreme conjunction with probability

he

his puerile shade

caressed and polished and rendered and laved

made supple by the wave and abstracted

from the hard bones lost between the planks

born

of a gambol

the sea with the grandfather tempting or the grandfather against the sea

an idle chance

Betrothal

whose

veil of illusion gushed their phobia

like the phantom of a gesture

will totter

will fall

madnessWILL ABOLISH

AS IF

an insinuation simple

in silence rolled with irony

or

the mystery

precipitated

howled

in some nearby whirlpool of hilarity or horror

flutters around the gulf

without strewing it

nor fleeing

and cradles the virgin index

AS IF

plume solitary distraught

save that encounters or skims it a midnight cap

and immobilizes

in velvet crumpled by a guffaw somber

that rigid whiteness

derisory

in opposition to the sky

too much

for not marking

exiguously

whosoever

bitter prince of the reef

puts it on like the heroic

irresistible but contained

by his little reason virile

in lightning

concerned

expiatory and pubescent

mutelaughter

that

IF

The lucid and seigniorial aigrette of vertigo

with invisible brow

scintillates

then shadows

a stature dainty tenebrous erect

in its siren torsion

time

to slap

with impatient scales ultimate bifurcated

a rock

false manor

right away

evaporated in mists

that imposed

a limit on infinity

IT WAS

stellar issueNUMBER

EXISTED HE

otherwise than scattered hallucination of agony

COMMENCED HE AND CEASED HE

upwelling but denied and closed when apparent

at last

by some profusion widespread in rarity

CIPHERED HE

evidence of the sum if only one

ILLUMINATED HE

IT WOULD BE

worse

no

more nor less

indifferently but as much CHANCE

Falls

the plume

rhythmic suspense of the sinister

to bury itself

in original foams

not long ago whence sprang up its delirium to a peak

withered

by the identical neutrality of the gulf

NOTHING

of the memorable crisis

when might

the event have been accomplished in view of every result null

human

WILL HAVE TAKEN PLACE

an ordinary elevation pours absence

BUT THE PLACE

inferior lapping whatsoever as if to disperse the act void

abruptly which if not

by its falsehood

might have founded

perdition

in those regions

of the wave

in which all reality dissolves

EXCEPT

at the altitude

PERHAPS

as far as a place fuses with beyond

apart from the interest

as to it signaled

in general

according to such obliquity by such declivity

of fires

toward

this must be

the Septentrion also North

A CONSTELLATION

cold from forgetting and desuetude

not so much

that it does not enumerate

on some surface vacant and superior

the successive clash

sidereally

of a total count in formation

watching

doubting

rolling

shining and meditating

before stopping

at some last point that consecrates it

Every Thought sends forth one Toss of the Dice

______________

Stéphane Mallarmé was born in Paris in 1842. He taught English in from 1864 in Tournon, Besançon, Avignon and Paris until his retirement in 1893. Malarmé began writing poetry at an early age under the influence of Charles Baudelaire. His first poems started to appear in magazines in the 1860s. Mallarmé’s most well known poems are L’Aprés Midi D’un Faun (The Afternoon of a Faun) (1865), which inspired Debussy’s tone poem (1894) of the same name and was illustrated by Manet. Among his other works are Hérodiade (1896) and Toast Funèbre (A Funeral Toast), which was written in memory of the author Théopile Gautier. Mallarmé’s later works include the experimental poem Un Coup de Dés (1914), published posthumously.

From the 1880s Mallarmé was the center of a group of french writers in Paris, including André Gide and Paul Valéry, to whom he communicated his ideas on poetry and art. According to his theories, nothing lies beyond reality, but within this nothingness lies the essence of perfect forms and it is the task of the poet to reveal and crystallize these essences. Mallarmé’s poetry employs condensed figures and unorthodox syntax. Each poem is build around a central symbol, idea, or metaphor and consists on subordinate images that illustrate and help to develop the idea. Mallarmé’s vers libre and word music shaped the 1890s Decadent movement.

For the rest of his life Mallarmé devoted himself to putting his literary theories into practice and writing his Grand Oeuvre (Great Work). Mallarmé died in Paris on September 9, 1898 without completing this work. (From Ubuweb)

A short entry for Sunday.

Hoping that this finds you at peace with yourself, and the world.

Take a couple of minutes today, sit outside and breath ever so deep of the gathering day.

Put your hands in the earth, and fill its living presence.

Listen to the wind, to the birds, to children playing near by if you are so lucky.

Live a prayer, live this moment.

Talk Tomorrow,

Gwyllm

On the Menu:

The Links

Decline and fall of the Roman myth

Poetry n’ Prose: Earth Prayers

___________________

The Links

Marimba Ponies!

Study links guns and hormones in men

A party full of desperate people?

For Your Listening Pleasure!

_____________________

Decline and fall of the Roman myth

We were ‘barbarians’, but early British civilisation outshone the Roman version, says ex-Python Terry Jones. We just lost the propaganda war

Nobody ever called themselves barbarians. It’s not that sort of word. It’s a word used about other people. It was used by the ancient Greeks to describe non-Greek people whose language they could not understand and who therefore seemed to babble unintelligibly: “ba ba ba”. The Romans adopted the Greek word and used it to label (and usually libel) the peoples who surrounded their own world.

The Roman interpretation became the only one that counted, and the peoples whom they called Barbarians became for ever branded — be they Spaniards, Britons, Gauls, Germans, Scythians, Persians or Syrians. And, of course, “barbarian” has become a byword for the very opposite of everything that we consider civilised.

The Romans kept the Barbarians at bay for as long as they could, but finally they were engulfed and the savage hordes overran the empire, destroying the cultural achievements of centuries. The light of reason and civilisation was almost snuffed out by the Barbarians, who annihilated everything that the Romans had put in place, sacking Rome itself and consigning Europe to the Dark Ages. The Barbarians brought only chaos and ignorance, until the renaissance rekindled the fires of Roman learning and art.

It is a familiar story, and it’s codswallop.

The unique feature of Rome was not its arts or its science or its philosophical culture, not its attachment to law. The unique feature of Rome was that it had the world’s first professional army. Normal societies consisted of farmers, hunters, craftsmen and traders. When they needed to fight they relied not on training or on standardised weapons, but on psyching themselves up to acts of individual heroism.

Seen through the eyes of people who possessed trained soldiers to fight for them, they were easily portrayed as simple savages. But that was far from the truth.

The fact that we still think of the Celts, the Huns, the Vandals, the Goths and so on as “barbarians” means that we have all fallen hook, line and sinker for Roman propaganda. We actually owe far more to the so-called “barbarians” than we do to the men in togas.

In the past 30 years, however, the story has begun to change. Archeological discoveries have shed new light on the ancient texts that have survived and this has led to new interpretations of the past. In Roman eyes the Celts may have lacked battle strategy, but their arms and equipment were in no way inferior to the Roman army’s. In fact the Celts had better helmets and better shields.

When the Romans got to Britain they found another technological advance: chariots. It may seem odd to those of us brought up on Ben Hur that the Romans should have been surprised by chariots on the battlefield, but that was the case.

The Romans had chariots, but the Britons made significant design improvements and, as Julius Caesar noted, had thoroughly mastered the art of using them. So how come the Romans built roads and the Celts did not? The answer is simple. The Celts did build roads. The “Romans-were-greatest” version of history made the earlier roads invisible until recently. One of the best preserved iron age roads is at Corlea in Ireland, but it was not until the 1980s that people realised how old it is. It was known locally as “the Danes’ road” and generally assumed to be of the Viking period or later. It was not until the timbers were submitted for tree-ring dating that the truth emerged: they were cut in 148BC.

However, the really startling thing is that wooden roads built the same way and at the same time have been found across Europe, as far away as northern Germany. The Celts, it seems, were sophisticated road builders and the construction of these wooden roads was no mean feat of engineering.

Oak planks were laid on birch runners and they were built broad enough for two carts to pass each other. What’s more, Celtic road building is not necessarily predated by that of the Romans. The first important Roman road was the Appian Way, built in 312BC, but the so-called “Upton Track” in south Wales, a wooden road laid across the mudflats along the Severn estuary, dates back to the 5th century BC.

It is only now that historians are beginning to reassess the sophistication of Celtic science and engineering. From early times the Celts were the iron masters of Europe. A Celtic smith was regarded as a magician, a man who could take a lump of rock and transform it into a magical new substance — a cunningly worked steel blade sharp enough to cut through bronze or ordinary iron.

The Celts’ mastery of metal technology also enabled them to develop sophisticated arable farms. We know they had iron ploughshares in Britain from about the 4th century BC because in a shrine at Frilford on the River Ock, near Abingdon in Oxfordshire — a site that was occupied from about 350BC — an iron ploughshare was found under one of the central pillars where it had been buried, perhaps as a votive offering. It is a fair guess that the temple was one of the first buildings to be erected there and that the iron ploughshare was offered at the time that its foundations were laid.

The Celts’ use of metal even allowed them to invent a harvesting machine. Historians did not believe that it could be true until bas-relief sculptures were discovered that apparently show just such a contraption. It was a sort of comb on wheels that beat off the ears of corn and deposited them in a container rather like the grass box of a lawnmower. A replica was built and tested in the 1980s.

It has been easy to underestimate Celtic technological achievements because so much has vanished or been misunderstood. Of course, it was thoughtless of the Celts not to leave us anything much in the way of written records — they should have known that the lack of books putting forward their own propaganda would weight the evidence firmly in favour of the Romans.

Western society’s enthusiasm since the renaissance for all things Roman has persuaded us to see much of the past through Roman eyes, even when contrary evidence stares us in the face. Once we turn the picture upside-down and look at history from a non-Roman point of view, things start to look very, very different.

(From Terry Jones’ Barbarians by Terry Jones and Alan Ereira to be published by BBC Books on May 18 at £18.99. The book is available for £17.09 including postage from The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585. Terry Jones’ Barbarians begins on BBC2 on Friday May 26)

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Meanwhile, back at Caer Llwydd’s Back Forty…

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Dance to Heal the Earth

by Dee Smith

Whenever you dance, wherever you dance, dance to heal the earth!

Dancing is power. Dancing is prayer. Some say that all is dance. Maybe. Now there’s a big dance coming, a dance to heal the earth. If you’re reading this, you’re probably part of it. You take part whenever you do whatever you do to help heal the earth. When you recycle. When you choose to show love, to fight for justice, to bring healing, to bring out what is good in others. When you avoid cruelty and dishonesty and waste. When you are outraged. When you speak out. When you give. When you consider the generations to come. When you protest to the oppressors and encourage those who feel the cutting edge of injustice. And, of course, when you dance. There is a tree that all the prophets see, and whenever you let your love show, you make the flowers grow.

Soon this dance will be done in a big way, in the old way, on sacred ground. All living things will take part. If you want to, you can take part. No one is twisting your arm. You can stop any time you need to, and start up again whenever you’re ready. If you’ve read this far, you probably know what I’m talking about. You’ve probably been doing it in one way or another for a good while. Soon will be the time to make no bones about it! Cut loose!

Anytime you dance, anywhere, whether at a party or in church, dance to heal the earth! Let your feet beat a healing rhythm into the earth. Let your feet beat a strengthening rhythm for those who struggle the hardest. Let your feet beat a life-giving rhythm for all peoples, regardless of race or national boundary, regardless of whether we’re human or whether we’re the trees, the air, the fish, the birds, the buffalo, the bear, the crow. We come out of hiding, we come back from the dead, and we dance, and our dance is a prayer, and our songs and our rhythms and our breath give life.

Is the music they’re playing some mindless jingle? Never mind, as long as it’s not bad music, and you can dance to the beat! Make your own words, and make the words a prayer. A prayer for the end of exploitation, a prayer for the end of lies, a prayer for healing, for justice, for life. Remember your prayer-song, feed it and let it get strong and pass it along. Dance and pray, whenever you dance, dance to heal the earth.

Have you seen anything? Wear it out! Make it so that all can see what you see! Take a white T-shirt and mark it with your dreams. Is there anything you’d like to tell the world? Take your shirt and mark it with your song! This is the way it has been done, so you can do it too. Use any color except black (there are reasons for that that will become clearer later), and you’ll probably find that a loose, pure cotton T is most comfortable for dancing in. Cos this is an actual dance, you dance hard, you sing and breathe hard and sweat. Wear it when you plan to go out dancing, to dance to heal the earth.

Some people do this dance while fasting, and dance for several days straight. But even a few minutes of dancing helps, and joins with all the other dancing going on, everywhere on Earth. Not everyone can fast these days. Besides, you never know when you’re gonna dance, and you have to eat sometimes! But if you plan to dance, hold off eating till later, or just have a little. It’s easier to dance if you don’t have a hotdog weighing you down.

Some people say, do not do sacred things where people are drinking and partying. But all the universe is a sacred place. It really doesn’t matter what others are doing, you can make a place sacred wherever you are, with your intention and your prayers. Some people use smoke to make a place sacred; a cigarette or incense stick will do fine. You can dance to heal the earth anywhere, even a party or a bar! The earth is everywhere, so you can dance anywhere to heal her. Only one thing. Please hold off drinking or using any other intoxicants till you’re done. It works better that way.

The Lie has gone far enough. It spreads and makes everyone sick. Now is the time for this dance to begin. It, too, will spread, and it will bring healing to all. In the beginning, they say, God put a rainbow in the sky, to let us know that Spirit never forgets. Now is the time for us to put a rainbow across the earth, to let God know that we, too, remember.

Dance to heal the earth. Not just when you’re dancing, but always. Live the dance, whenever you move, in all you do, dance to heal the earth.

————–

“The Earth Prayer”

Black Elk Oglala Sioux, Medicine Man

“Grandfather, Great Spirit, once more behold

me on earth and lean to hear my feeble voice.

You lived first, and you are older than all need,

older than all prayer. All things belong to you

– the two-legged, the four-legged, the wings

of the air, and all green things that live.

You have set the powers of the four quarters of the earth to cross each other. You have made me cross the good road and road of difficulties, and where they cross, the place is holy. Day in, day out, forevermore, you are the life of things.

Hey! Lean to hear my feeble voice.

At the center of the sacred hoop

You have said that I should make the tree to bloom.

With tears running, O Great Spirit, my Grandfather,

With running eyes I must say

The tree has never bloomed

Here I stand, and the tree is withered.

Again, I recall the great vision you gave me.

It may be that some little root of the sacred tree still lives.

Nourish it then

That it may leaf

And bloom

And fill with singing birds!

Hear me, that the people may once again

Find the good road

And the shielding tree.”

————–

I Live My Life

Rainer Maria Rilke

I live my life in widening rings

which spread over earth and sky.

I may not ever complete the last one,

but that is what I will try.

I circle around God’s primordial tower,

and I circle ten thousand years long;

And I still don’t know if I’m a falcon,

a storm, or an unfinished song.

—————

Kiss The Earth

Thich Nhat Hanh

Walk and touch peace every moment.

Walk and touch happiness every moment.

Each step brings a fresh breeze.

Each step makes a flower bloom.

Kiss the Earth with your feet.

Bring the Earth your love and happiness.

The Earth will be safe

when we feel safe in ourselves.