The Cinquefoil Press

Welsh Buzzards

2012-02-05T05:41:00.000-08:00

Welsh Buzzards

October 2009

I am sick of being old
And I pang for the ridges of Eyri
Bellowing down to the crag and cwm
Under a grey sky
Where buzzards fly.

And I long for Beudy Mawr,
With it Welshness trickle of a stream,
Staring out into a wild and barren cwm
Where buzzards ply.

I am sick of being old,
And I long for the Welsh peaks,
With their crags and cwms,
Under a grey sky
Where buzzards cry.

Keith Treacher

Treen

2010-10-23T10:15:00.000-07:00

Looking towards Treen Oct 2008

We are standing on the battlements of Treen

One night, with moon full, pregnant with life,

Not a breath of wind, spellbound.

Distant sounds trail back and forth across the headland,

Winding up the veined valleys, cresting the tops,

Brushing the rocks that gaze across the concourse

Rising proud against the shadowed night.

And they are numinous still,

Eastern heads lifting to the glinting lights In distant coves,

While deep in mounds of earth souls sleep silent,

Quickening in their slumber as they dream.

And mighty Morgawr, curled on his seat of storms,

Death and memory like the sea swirling and breaking in his thoughts.

Morgawr, you play out your siege against the men of means

And I have eaten your sacred words.

And they have filled my belly with their sweetness.

And my eye is drawn green to far outstretched Bolerium

From pulpit rock towards Pen-von-las,

And to her, striding resolutely, skirts billowing,

Her tresses trailing deep in the darkened waters,

Seductive and secretive, nubile and ancient, maid and hag,

Mother and whore to the dark-eyed seaman.

To the ancient tin miner; mellifluous and sweet

I sing my siren song.

And the words are myriad, the workmanship of souls.

I sing to the ocean of past and future.

I sing to the night and all that is holy.

I sing to the mourners who gather in grief.

I sing to the saint as he exalts the almighty.

As he stands in transcendence reaching alone on his windblown island,

That glorious moment amongst seagulls and spume.

This was my moment - I defy you to see...

Weep you no more

2009-12-22T02:07:00.000-08:00

Weep you no more, sad fountains;
What need you flow so fast?
Look how the snowy mountains
Heaven's sun doth gently waste.
But my sun's heavenly eyes
View not your weeping,
That now lies sleeping
Softly, now softly lies
Sleeping.

Sleep is a reconciling,
A rest that peace begets:
Doth not the sun rise smiling
When fair at even he sets?
Rest you then, rest, sad eyes,
Melt not in weeping,
While she lies sleeping
Softly, now softly lies
Sleeping.

Anon

The Feast of St Crispian

2009-11-05T01:10:00.000-08:00

25th October - A Black Letter Day

This day is called the feast of St Crispian
And we are apt to promise much.
Glorious this golden soft October,

Fallen and fermenting,

Plunging deep into the Kentish Shire.

We begin at Cranbrook with sign and portent good,

Passed thicket and sweet brook,

With chestnut meat and apple red.

To follow the greenwood canyon is our desire.

And you will say today is St Crispian,

And we in it shall be remembered, we happy two,

On Oxney at Wittersham, Ebony and Stone.

And what of the bowman of England,

Called upon to fight at Agincourt on this day,

Raising the two fingered salute,

Defiant and victorious to the end.

This day is victory too, this time in 2009,

For them, still breathing, still golden,

Still feasting, scented mellow,
Citadels of parasols in meadows sweet,

Flowers of the forest, field in seasonal praise.

And the Lamb beckons with its ghostly rooms,

And the night is falling with the crescent moon,

And the last bus to Rye is silently borne,

Night lighted, to the coast.

VH & MW Walk, 25 October 09

Between which we walk

2009-09-28T12:40:00.000-07:00

Let us go then you and I

Down these many corridors of stone,

Open to the winter stillness,

A thaw in motion, somnambulant in mood.

I have seen all things pass and all men go

In the hall of the Royal Dûnn at Tara

Under the shadow of the drifting leaf.Listen!

The rocks and trees are whispering,

And slowly, very slowly,

Like a world caught in breath, we wait to exhale.

Caught between the present and future,

At the height of expectation

Exhilaration is the moment

Of sweet release.

I have heard you calling, Dalua, Dalua!

Arise from your dreams on Mount Amara

And walk with me, tripping down the nights and days,

Mind and muse, moving together,
A marriage of true minds, intoxicating one another,
Drinking from that conjugal cup,

A silent communion, a willing communication.

And in the eternal landscape of the here and now,

In the post-glacial history, lies an archive in the granite rock.

Layer upon layer of stored fable and fact

Between which we walk, between the stones,

Amidst the lithological annals, over the pebbles,

Over the grit, touching the quivering branches,

The vibrant mosses, the glistening webs.

Navigate through this inner landscape,
Polyhymnia you are my guide.
Tread carefully across the boulders,

Across the numinous ride of the track,

Across the Earth's sweet cleavages.

And we, each of us upon the last and sharpest height,

Feel the air is thin and oblivion not far away.

VH 2009

The Waves

2009-09-27T09:56:00.001-07:00

Senescence.
I harbour and float in a universe of light.
Save the drifting fabric, there is no sound,
Save the glinting sun there is no movement.
Save the blood in my veins there is no life.
Light and waves dapple against the glass,
The curtain, printed limpet with flowers,Blows easily across the warm wood,
Back and forth,
Back and forth.

So blossoms on the opaque blue
Spangle the tangles of green fishes,

And scallop shells, shiny with light,
Lilt on the gentle lisp of cotton.
Time flows. I dream.
And in this fishy mead in flowerland heaven

Drifting on this silver sea.

I close my eyes to see my dreams

In appreciation of Virgina Woolf

VH 2009

Thanet Adventure

2009-09-12T00:59:00.000-07:00

Richborough Towers - Beside the River Stour, 8th June 2009

Stolen time it is when summer flowers

And glistens in the morning sun.

Down to the Stour we trip,

Under the sun and the strawberry moon,

Breaking bread among the flag irises,

Trampling over the rushes,

Feeling the surge of the on-coming tide,

Sensing ,as the space opens out, another field of vision.

June, the gateway to the 'other',

It would serve us well to pay attention.

'Dies Natalis' for Mens Bona.

Good God, good mind, personification

Of Thought's day, we salute you.

This trip to some other side takes our breath away.

Sleepy now, as lambs they dream

Hyperboloids of Shukhov,

Thanet's dark towers,

Tucked up beside the Stour.

Three million tons of coal and Richborough

Lays bare its bones in peace and soon,

With the rain gently falling,

We take cover to watch flotsam floating.

Inspired by Grotowski we drift into the drip,

Drip, drip of the play. Our figs are cornucopic.

We leave and follow the actors downstream.

Softly falls the rain.

And Running down to Pegwell Bay by bus,

We hunger - wondering about Hengist and Horsa,

Asking how St Augustine landed his boat,

How he converted the rough islanders of Ruoihm

With his zeal and cruel judgements,

And did he notice in the eventide,

With its skies blossoming from green to pink.

The pretty multicoloured parrots?

The famous Thanet parrots of the wayside trees.

Goodnight! Sleep tight!

You that dream of palms and exotic fruits.

We find the pathway home and take our leave.

VH 2009

Middum Sumera

2009-09-11T13:36:00.000-07:00

Solstice, we walk under the midday sun.
Breathing in the cloudless skies,
Smiling round, catching minty blue,
Brimming beach-like and drawing fresh,
Our teeth glinting, bared to face
The Westering breeze.

Summer, and we, drifting lightly
To daisy down, to stay afloat,
High to the eye of the Uffington horse
Cut rich in the thick leaf-green sward,
Pearly spell of chalk, blanching white
Against the tide of time.

Standing cool on the equine summit,
With the day luxurious long, the immutable dot
Casts glances to the edge beyond all human knowing.
And we, who stand in a haze of dreams,
Feel your beading eye casting beams across the land.

Let's saddle your scudding turf-cut form now
To ride far and wide across the curving vale
High above the bloom of wayside brides that line the fields
and lace the lanes.

Time rolls on, and with each wave
We cast our nets high up to the rounded beech and
Looking down we see them, they that dance to the water's edge,

Caught up in a maze of rhythm,

Swaying across the hill to the soft edge of the vale.

Play the turfs a tune my dear and see the grasses dance.

We are insouciant,

Lost in the fullness of things, we look,
Glimpsing into the world pool,
Poised, not dancing now, but skimming shadow stones
Across the twilight of the next generation.

VH 25th June 2009

Summer Rain

2009-06-06T02:03:00.000-07:00

Early this morning when the sky
Darkened from azure to grey
We sensed the gathering imminence
Of rain, and built our rough cover over.

Last night, talking late on the phone, we noticed
The holes, renting larger and more gaping,
Rotting our foundations
And letting in the damp.

Was it Caesar who went to war
Stepped over the Rubicon.
Is it now we know
The river has changed its course,
The vital line is not so absolute.

In a clap of thunder the air is broken.
And, cold as the shower in the back room bath,
Against the darkening green,
Lines of tears run down.

Stepping over the line you have to find it first.
A Rubicon indeed.

VH 2009

This Night Has Stretched

2009-05-18T13:49:00.001-07:00

This night has stretched its long delays and won.
The creatures that abhor a yearning, slap me down.
Too late the morning star's forever hung too high,
With mercury flitting on his winged feet about the place,
Busy with lifes messages while his venus waits.

This venial journey has to end so why not now?
No poet of a former age contests to win
The cosy dwelling with cosy mate to snuggle down.
Slavering in pint pots, patting belly in chimney pots,
Tucked up in bed.

Pain has come first to learn the lesson.

VH May 2009

Comely Order

2009-04-14T08:35:00.000-07:00

Flames that know no homelier hearth than yours
Expend their warmth in vibrant light.
Readily given are the flowers of undying colour;
The youthful years of sacrifice are not forgotten.
This is your gift to your children and your children's children.

This woman's realm was full of soft extensions
One womb, two births ,
Two fruits nourished by creative order.
Motherhood recalls the mind, gently soothing away
The stresses from the outside world.

Inside you created a garden of sorts, a solice.
Blending rich rosied fragrance into pictures resplendent.
Yielding form and shape, calm and secure.
This was your generous world enriched and filled
With love for your little daughters.

You should never have left the aetherial sphere
Yours is forever the world of the child.
Too late it was to save your tender soul
From violent intrusions of the male world
Too late to save your grown up daughters from your actions.

Long ago and far away - we learn to forgive...

VH 1980/2009

The Hours

2009-04-09T08:24:00.000-07:00

Horae - Goddess of the order of nature and the seasons, stationed at the doors of Olympus.

The Cocktail of Mutuality...

Why two people need each other, why they will each be better together than either of them would be on their own. 'Your observant gaze which rests so still and pure on things, never leads you to the errors to which speculations, guided by capricious imagination and merely obeying its own rules, so easily falls prey' ( Schiller to Goether 1794)

Political progress can occur only if there is a transformation of people's inner lives, otherwise factions are merely the voices of human fragments seeking dominance over society...

Writing Poetry by the Kitchen Sink

2009-04-09T07:28:00.000-07:00

To be in dialogue is strength itself,
Communicating verse by verse
Between us seem so natural, so good;
The industry of two people.

Sitting here amongst the clutter of paper and
Dog earred remnant unsuccess, I am satisfied to be alone.
To hear my inner voice in a noiseless world,
The darting thoughts and humming dreams continue, and

Seventy post weary miles away you are also writing,
A reply in kind, choosing your words with care for me,
Waiting for type written inspiration,
In anticipation we are expectant of what we shall find.

In time we shall be rich indeed with writing,
In time we shall have our success.
In my minds eye we are both watching,
Two spirits waiting for the sun to shine.

V.H. Colveston Crescent London, March 1986

We are Creatures of Narrative

2009-02-28T06:26:00.000-08:00

We are each of us a compound of memories and hopes, and the present is where past and future meet in striving or exhaustion, triumph or despair: each of these states and many others are defined by the relationship of our past to our expectations. We are creatures of narrative; the next instalment of the story interests us crucially; therefore death, either of someone we love, or as the indefinite prospect of our own absence from the story, typically counts as evil...

A.C. Grayling 'The Meaning of Things'

Transformation

2009-02-12T04:13:00.000-08:00

Mosses at Merryvale

The kingdom of plants can easily be thought of as the nearest neighbour of the kingdom of death. Perhaps the mysteries of transformation and the enigmas of life which so torment us are concentrated in the green of the earth, among the trees in graveyards and the flowering shoots springing from their beds.

Boris Paskernak: Doctor Zhivago

Dew Pond Makers

2009-02-12T04:09:00.000-08:00

Downland Dew Pond

A valuable article by the Rev. Edgar Glanfield, Vicar of Imber, Wiltshire Gazette, Dec. 29th, 1922,

“Up to ten years ago the dew pond makers started upon their work about the 12th of September, and they toured the country for a period of six or seven months, making in sequence from six to fifteen ponds, according to size and conveniences, in a season of winter and spring..... They travelled throughout Wiltshire and Hampshire, and occasionally into Somersetshire arid Berkshire, and even into Kent.” The dew pond maker with three assistants at 18s. a week, would require about four weeks to make a pond 22 yards, or one chain, square. Providing all his own tools and appliances he would charge about £40 for the work. “ The work commenced by the removal of the soil to the depth of eight feet. The laying of the floor is then proceeded with from the centre, called the crown, four or five yards in circumference, and to this each day a width of about two yards is added, and continued, course by course until the sides of the basin attain to the normal level of the site. Only so much work with the layers of materials set in order, is undertaken in one day as can be finished at night, and this must be covered over with straw and steined. No layering may be done in frosty or inclement weather. And this is the method of construction:- seventy cart loads of clay are scattered over the area, suggested above. The clay is thoroughly puddled, trodden and beaten in flat with beaters, a coat of lime is spread, slaked, and rightly beaten until the surface is as smooth as a table, and it shines like glass. After it has been hammered in twice, a second coat of lime is applied, to the thickness of half-an-inch, which is wetted and faced to save the under face. A waggon load of straw is arranged and the final surface is covered with rough earth to the thickness of nine inches. The pond when finished affords a depth of water of seven feet." It is then fenced round to keep off cattle and horses, whose hoofs, would break through the bed, and admit sheep only, for whose use the ponds are made. The durability of the dew pond is put at “perhaps 20 years, though “there are ponds in good condition now which were made 36 years ago, and which have never been known to fail to yield an adequate supply of water even in this year of drought (1921). The decay of the industry is attributed partly to the greatly increased cost of the making of the ponds, and partly to the fact that they have been superseded by the windmill pumping water from wells.

Festival of Eternity

2009-01-05T11:07:00.000-08:00

Twelfth Eve (Vigil of the Epiphany, Paramone of the Theophany)

Ancient Rome: on this day (when calibrated with the Roman calendar) on the Greek island of Andoros, the 'Theodosia' or 'Gift of the God' was celebrated; it was on this day that a wonder occured. The water of a spring by the temple of Dionysos tasted like wine and continued to do so for a week, though the taste was lost if the water was taken out of sight of the temple. In the evening, during the later Roman empire, there began at Alexandria a festival that continued into the next day, a celebration of the birth, at cockcrow, of Aion (Eternity) to Kore (the Maid) at which water was ceremonially drawn from the Nile and stored; since Aion was closely associated with Sarapis, who in turn was associated with Dionysus, the suggestion has been made that the god was meant to turn the water into wine. This would explain why the Christian Epiphany (6th January) was associated with Christ's performance of this miracle at the wedding-feast in Cana (it was also associated with the miracle of the loaves and fishes).

5th January, Source - The Oxford Companion to the Year

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serapis

2009-01-05T10:54:00.000-08:00

Wistmans Wood

Twelfth Eve Divinations

Lay a greene Ivye leafe in a dishe, or other vessell of fayre water on Newyeeres euen at night, and couer the water in the said vessell, set it in a sure or safe place, untill Twelfe euen next after, either for yourselfe or for anye other, (which will be the fifth day of January,) and then... marke well if the sayde leafe be faire and greene as it was before: for then you or the party for whom you laid it into the water, will be whole and sound and safe from any sicknesse all the next yeere following. But if you finde any blacke spots theron, then you or the partye for whom you laid it into the water, will be sicke the same yeere following.

Lupton, (1579)

The Causeway Resurrection

2009-01-04T03:48:00.000-08:00

Anna on the Causeway - October 2008

…Resurrection. – In the crude form in which it is preached for the consolation of the weak, the idea doesn’t appeal to me. I have always understood Christ’s words about the living and the dead in a different sense. Where could you find room for all these hordes of people collected over thousands of years? The universe isn’t big enough, God and good and meaning would be crowded out. They’d be crushed by all that greedy animal jostling.

‘But all the time life, always one and the same, always incomprehensibly keeping its identity, fills the universe and is renewed at every moment in innumerable combinations and metamorphoses. You are anxious about whether you will rise from the dead or not, but you have risen already – you rose from the dead when you were born and you didn’t notice it. Will you feel pain? Do the tissues feel their disintegration? In other words, what will happen to your consciousness? But what is consciousness? Let’s see. To try consciously to go to sleep is a sure way to have insomnia, to try to be conscious of one’s own digestions is a sure way to upset the stomach. Consciousness is a poison when we apply it to ourselves. Consciousness is a beam of light directed outwards, it lights up the way ahead of us so that we don’t trip up. It’s like the head-lamps on a railway engine – if you turned the beam inwards there would be a catastrophe.

‘So what will happen to your consciousness? …What is it about you that you have always known as yourself? What are you conscious of in yourself? Your kidneys? Your liver? Your blood vessels? - No. However far back you go in your memory, it is always in some external, active manifestation of yourself that you come across your identity – in the work of your hands, in your family, in other people. And now look. You in others are yourself, your soul. This is what you are. This is what your consciousness has breathed and lived on and enjoyed throughout your life. – Your soul, your immortality, your life in others. And what now? You have always been in others and you will remain in others. And what does it matter to you if later on it is called your memory? This will be you - the you that enters the future and becomes a part of it…

Dr Zhivago, Boris Pasternak 1956

A Poem for the New Year

2009-01-03T03:40:00.000-08:00

By Tim Munton 2008

Peace and Light and pink striped mice to you:
Where rainbow cymbals forever bimble
On forgotten shores through wardrobe doors,
And halucy-sky diamonds dive
Into ponds of liquid sun and golden skies,
Where the Heart of Love never dies
But rises-phoenix through the mind,
and bubble-blossoms in timeless time.

The Taste of Things to Come

2009-01-03T02:39:00.000-08:00

A bleak poem inspired by ee cummings

I thank you God for most this...
And my inner eye rests on all the waste of
What human happens in the world.
No need to spell it out - you know for sure -
Or can imagine what it is.

The leaping greenly spirits that express the yes are not enough today.
The blue true dream of sky is infinitely silent.
The confusion of the human race is more real and rises in my mind triumphant,
The malcontent and the maladjusted vent their psychosis unabated,
And the ill wind that blows no good, shows no mercy.
Its bitter icy air freezes and will not be stilled it seems.

Oh that the ears of my ears could be silent.
Oh that the eyes of my eyes could be darkened.
Oblivion is sweet and has a deeper knowing.
Drinking it in - the taste of things to come.

VH 2009

Tree and Leaf

2008-12-21T08:22:00.000-08:00

Wistmans Wood, Oct 2008

... the 'consolation' of fairy-stories has another aspect than the imaginative satisfaction of ancient desires. Far more important is the Consolation of the Happy Ending. Almost I would venture to assert that all complete fairy-stories must have it. At least I would say that Tragedy is the true form of Drama, its highest function; but the opposite is true of Fairy-story. Since we do not appear to possess a word that expresses this opposite - I will call it Eucatastrophe. the eucatastrophe tale is the true form of fairy-tale, and its highest function.

The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous 'turn' (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially 'escapist', nor 'fugitive'. In this fairy-tale - or otherworld - setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. it does not deny the existence of dycastastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.

It is the mark of a good fairy-story, of the higher or more complete kind, that however wild its events, however fantastic or terrible the adventures, it can give to child or man that hears it, when the 'turn' comes, a catch of the breath, a beat and lifting of the heart, near to (or indeed accompanied by) tears, as keen as that given by any form of lterary art, and haveing a peculiar quality...

... in such stories when the sudden 'turn' comes we get a piercing glimpse of joy, and heart's desire, that for a moment passes outside the frame, rends indeed the very web of story, and lets a gleam come through.

JRR Tolkein - Tree and Leaf

On Fariy Stories

2008-12-21T08:18:00.000-08:00

Kent, May 2008

...fairy-stories are not the only means of recovery, or prophylactic against loss. Humility is enough. And there is (especially for the humble) Mooreeffoc, or Chestertonian Fantasy. Mooreeffoc is a fantastic word, but it could be seen written up in every town in this land. It is Coffee-room, viewed from the inside through a glass door, as it was seen by Dickens on a dark London day; and it was used by Chesterton to denote the queerness of things that have become trite, when they are seen suddenly from a new angle. That kind of "fantasy" most people would allow to be wholesome enough; and it can never lack for material. But it has, I think, only a limited power; for the reason that recovery of freshness of vision is its only virtue. The word Mooreeffoc may cause you suddenly to realize that England is an utterly alien land, lost either in some remote past age glimpsed by history, or in some strange dim future to be reached only by a time-machine; to see the amazing oddity and interest of its inhabitants and their customs and feeding-habits; but it cannot do more than that: act as a time-telescope focused on one spot. Creative fantasy, because it is mainly trying to do something else (make something new), may open your hoard and let all the locked things fly away like cage-birds. The gems all turn into flowers or flames, and you will be warned that all you had (or knew) was dangerous and potent, not really effectively chained, free and wild; no more yours than they were you. The "fantastic" elements in verse and prose of other kinds, even when only decorative or occasional, help in this release. But not so thoroughly as a fairy-story, a thing built on or about Fantasy, of which Fantasy is the core. Fantasy is made out of the Primary World, but a good craftsman loves his material, and has a knowledge and feeling for clay, stone and wood which only the art of making can give.
[J. R. R. Tolkien, "On Fairy Stories" in Tree and Leaf 77-78]

The Eerie Realism of a Dull Corner

2008-12-21T08:16:00.000-08:00

Margate Festival 2008

Herein is the whole secret of that eerie realism with which Dickens could always vitalize some dark or dull corner of London. There are details in the Dickens descriptions - a window, or a railing, or the keyhole of a door - which he endows with demoniac life. The things seem more actual than things really are. Indeed, that degree of realism does not exist in reality: it is the unbearable realism of a dream. And this kind of realism can only be gained by walking dreamily in a place; it cannot be gained by walking observantly. Dickens himself has given a perfect instance of how these nightmare minutiae grew upon him in his trance of abstraction. He mentions among the coffee-shops into which he crept in those wretched days one in St. Martin's Lane, "of which I only recollect that it stood near the church, and that in the door there was an oval glass plate with 'COFFEE ROOM' painted on it, addressed towards the street. If I ever find myself in a very different kind of coffee-room now, but where there is such an inscription on glass, and read it backwards on the wrong side, MOOR EEFFOC (as I often used to do then in a dismal reverie), a shock goes through my blood." That wild word, "Moor Eeffoc," is the motto of all effective realism; it is the masterpiece of the good realistic principle - the principle that the most fantastic thing of all is often the precise fact. And that elvish kind of realism Dickens adopted everywhere. His world was alive with inanimate objects.
[GKC, Charles Dickens CW15:65]

I Look at Myself

2008-11-14T01:57:00.000-08:00

I look at myself
And I am grown old.
You say you love me
But I am not the one.
I see trouble ahead - I say
Ready to pounce – you say
I told you so.

The baby is in ruins – not much of it left, I dreamt.
The wind is prowling, maybe off it's head, I said.
Raging in pain the planet is plaintive, you said
We carry on.
We carry on.

And my mother, in her cups,
Is dying.
The year, in its throes
Is dying.
The bees, in their hives
Are dying.

And I am so sorry, so sorry.

The voices argue over again
and I remain dumb.

VH 2008

Mythopoeia

2008-10-28T04:49:00.000-07:00

Wistmans Wood 2008

To one who said that myths were lies and therefore worthless, even though ‘breathed through silver.

Philomythus to Misomythus

You look at trees and label them just so, (for trees are ‘trees’, and growing is ‘to grow’); you walk the earth and tread with solemn pace one of the many minor globes of Space: a star’s a star, some matter in a ball compelled to courses mathematical amid the regimented, cold, Inane, where destined atoms are each moment slain.

At bidding of a Will, to which we bend (and must), but only dimly apprehend, great processes march on, as Time unrolls from dark beginnings to uncertain goals; and as on page o’erwritten without clue, with script and limning packed of various hue, an endless multitude of forms appear, some grim, some frail, some beautiful, some queer, each alien, except as kin from one remote Origo, gnat, man, stone, and sun. God made the petreous rocks, the arboreal trees, tellurian earth, and stellar stars, and these homuncular men, who walk upon the ground with nerves that tingle touched by light and sound. The movements of the sea, the wind in boughs, green grass, the large slow oddity of cows, thunder and lightening, birds that wheel and cry, slime crawling up form mud to live and die, these each are duly registered and print the brains contortions with a separate dint.

Yet trees are not ‘trees’, until so named and seen – and never were so named, till those had been who speech’s involuted breath unfurled, faint echo and dim picture of the world, but neither record nor a photograph, being divination, judgement, and a laugh, response of those that felt astir within by deep monition movements that were kin to life and death of trees, of beasts, of stars: free captives undermining shadowy bars, digging the foreknown from experience and panning the vein of spirit out of sense. Great powers they slowly brought out of themselves, and looking backward they beheld the elves that wrought on cunning forges in the mind, and light and dark on secret looms entwined. He sees no stars who does not see them first of living silver made that sudden burst to flame like flowers beneath an ancient song, whose very echo after-music long has since pursued. There is no firmament, only a void, unless a jewelled tent myth-woven and elf-patterned; and no earth, unless the mother’s womb whence all have birth.

The heart of man is not compound of lies, but draws some wisdom from the only Wise, and still recalls him. Though now long estranged, man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed. Dis-graced he may be, yet is not dethroned, and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned, his world-dominion by creative act: not his to worship the great Artefact, man, sub-creator, the refracted light through whom is splintered from a single White to many hues, and endlessly combined in living shapes that move from mind to mind. though all the crannies of the world we filled with elves and goblins, though we dared to build gods and their houses out of dark and light, and sow the seed of dragons, ‘twas our right (used or misused). The right has not decayed. We make still by the law in which we’re made.

Yes! ‘wish-fulfilment dreams’ we spin to cheat our timid hearts and ugly Fact defeat!
Whence came the wish, and whence the power to dream, or some things fair and others ugly deem? All wishes are not idle, nor in vain fulfilment we devise – for pain is pain, not for itself to be desired, but ill; or else to strive or to subdue the will alike were graceless; and of Evil this alone is dreadly certain: Evil is.

Blessed are the timid hearts that evil hate, that quail in its shadow, and yet shut the gate; that seek no parley, and in guarded room, though small and bare, upon a clumsy loom weave tissues gilded by the far-off day hoped and believed in under Shadow’s sway.

Blessed are the men of Noah’s race that build their little arks, though frail and poorly filled, and steer through winds contrary towards a wraith, a rumour of a harbour guessed by faith.

Blessed are the legend-makers with their rhyme of things not found within recorded time.
It is not they that have forgot the Night, or bid us flee to organised delight, in lotus-isles of economic bliss forswearing souls to gain a Circe-kiss (and counterfeit at that, machine-produced, bogus seduction of the twice-seduced).

Such isles they saw afar, and ones more fair, and those that hear them yet may yet beware.
They have seen Death and ultimate defeat, and yet they would not in despair retreat, but oft to victory have turned the lyre and kindled hearts with legendary fire, illuminating Now and dark Hath-been with light of suns as yet by no man seen.

I would that I might with the minstrels sing and stir the unseen with a throbbing string. I would be with the mariners of the deep that cut their slender planks on mountains steep and voyage upon a vague and wandering quest, for some have passed beyond the fabled West. I would with the beleaguered fools be told, that keep an inner fastness where their gold, impure and scanty, yet they loyally bring to mint in image blurred of distant king, or in fantastic banners weave the sheen heraldic emblems of a lord unseen.

I will not walk with your progressive apes erect and sapient. Before them gapes the dark abyss to which their progress tends – if by God’s mercy progress ever ends, and does not ceaselessly revolve the same unfruitful course with changing of a name. I will not tread your dusty path and flat, denoting this and that by this and that, your world immutable wherein no part the little maker has with maker’s art. I bow not yet before the Iron Crown, nor cast my own small golden sceptre down. In Paradise perchance the eye may stray from gazing upon everlasting Day to see the day-illumined, and renew from mirrored truth the likenesses of the True. Then looking on the Blessed Land ‘twill see that all is as it is, and yet made free: Salvation changes not, nor yet destroys, garden nor gardener, children nor their toys. Evil it will not see, for evil lies not in God’s picture but in crooked eyes, not in the source but in malicious choice, and not in sound but in the tuneless voice. In Paradise they look no more awry; and though they make anew, they make no lie. Be sure they still will make, not being dead, and poets shall have flames upon their head, and harps whereon their faultless fingers fall: there each shall choose for ever from the All.
JRR Tolkein

The Madness of the Caravanserai

2008-10-14T11:19:00.000-07:00

Photo - West Bay, Dorset

And then there are places and regions farther afield, places on the verge of London, as unknown to the vast majority of Londoners as Harran in Abyssinia. To attain these, the general recipe is to take something that goes out of London by the Seven Sisters Road, something that touches on Finsbury Park, which, I take it, is the extremest mark of the Londinia cognita Londiniensibus; the caravanserai from which the caravans set out across the wilderness; the merchants telling tales of travellers who journeyed on just such a voyage and travail and were heard and seen no more of men; though some chroniclers, in the fashion of old Mandeville, and therefore not to be trusted overmuch, hardily affirm that these very rapt personages have been noted going to chapel on Sundays in Grinders Green, wearing silk hats and frock coats, or as doing their own marketing on Saturday nights, haggardly, awfully, as men dwelling under the command of a djinneh, on the heights of Tottenham Rye. Such tales they tell of them that scoffed at the predictions of the geomancers, and undertook the journey of the great caravan that sets out from Finsbury Park, a station on the Great Northern Railway – I have not duly noted its new name – from York Road. His Name is the Merciful, the Compassionate, the King of the Day of Judgment; and in the Halls of Eblis there is no backyard gloomier than the backyard in which York Road Station, King’s Cross, is situate. O true believers: be not misguided by those who speak proudly of Euston and Somers Town: for they stray from the truth.

Alas ! I am sane, as the doctors persist, and so I cannot show these visions.

The London Adventure p.134 Arthur Machen

Arthur Machen Laments

2008-10-14T03:27:00.001-07:00

Photo - Margate Festival 2008

“Really; it is quite clear that Art… is in the very bones of humanity, that it is the differentia of man, that which makes him to be what he is, that distinguishes him from sheep and goats, that nourish a blind life within the brain. And how infinitely strange it is that we, who are men because we are artists, should begin to suspect that if we are artists we are mad. Genius, art are, I take it , vision; the power of seeing further, seeing deeper, seeing more than we others see, with secondary part of expression, the power of communicating in notes, or paint, or marble, or words the thing that has been thus seen…

… ah! If I had but been one of this happy race of lunatics; how I would have shaken your hearts with the picture of Clarendon Road, Notting Hill Gate (Arthur Machen as a young man) , somewhat bowery, somewhat stuccoey, vanishing into October mists and dimness forty years ago on still, dull evenings; with the picture of the poor lad who lived in the little top room on No. 23, issuing forth and pacing the dull, still ways, dreaming, ever dreaming and burning for the great adventure of literature; seeing the stones glow into spagyric gold beneath his feet, seeing the plane trees in the back gardens droop down from fairyland, seeing a mystery behind every blind, and the infinite mystery in the grey-blue distance, where, as they tell me, for I have never sought to know, the street becomes dubious, if not desolate.”

The London Adventure p.130 Arthur Machen

Catching Abstract Triangles

2008-10-14T03:11:00.000-07:00

Photo - Margate Festival 2008

We move, as I have said before, in a world of illusions, but of illusions on one plane. We are mistaken if we think that there is, in ultimate reality, any such thing as a cube, any such thing as a cow; but, at all events, these two are apparently on the same surface of being. But, now and then, there are intrusions upon us from other worlds, probably quite as illusory as our own. And we are accordingly left stupefied. There is no t” therefore”; no ratio. Suppose a mathematician, in the high matters of his science, to come upon a conic section singing a comic song. Suppose a gamekeeper trapping weasels – and catching Abstract Triangles, or a classical scholar finding the optative mood turning into white mice, with small, gilt bells. Thus it was when the coals shot out of the coal-scuttle at Farringay on the King’s Cross Line (a case of poltergeist), when the mud walls broke upon the Bishop’s holy head in Zanzibar; when I say the name “ Le Fleming” - or Fleming – on the brass plate in the Earl’s Court Road…

But, after all, from all this there does result this one moral…that the world, the sum of things of which we are cognisant, is infinitely queer, that even in the rind or surface of it the strangest essences are lurking, that tremendous beauties, amazing oddities are everywhere present, wearing very often, to use the Wardrobe Master’s phrase, Disguise Cloaks of the most commonplace pattern.

The London Adventure p.122 Arthur Machen

The Grey Hills

2008-10-14T03:07:00.000-07:00

Sun Through the Leaves

I would write of a man on his summer holiday,… I would write of him as coming to my old territory , and as he ran down the shore of the Severn and the level lands to Newport noting something strange, in the shape of the wild Grey Hills to the north, something outland in those greeny dells of Wentwood, that hide in their lower slopes buried walls and temples. I would take my man to Caerleon-on-Usk and show him the grey Roman walls mouldering there above the green turf, and show him the red sunset over the mountain, and the tawny river swimming to the flood. He should go wandering away, this unfortunate fellow, into such a country as he had never dreamed of; he should lose himself in intricacies of deep lanes descending from wooded heights to hidden and solitary valleys, where the clear water of the winding brook sounds under the alder trees. He should be high on Mynydd Maen in the morning, in the fullness of the sun, and drink in the wind that blows there, and look out on the rolling billows of the land, and far down yellow Severn Sea; and finally he should come home again to London and perceive that wonderful things have been wrought in him; that these woods and hollows, these ancient walls and buried temples, this might and majesty of sun and wind upon the summit of the great mountain wall, these enclosed, still valleys of hidden peace and wonder; that all these things have discoursed to him a great mystery, whereby his soul has been renewed within him.

The London Adventure p.137 Arthur Machen

Notes for the Hill of Dreams

2008-10-14T03:04:00.000-07:00

The Colour Purple - 2008

He wondered whether all the objects of nature are not purely symbolical; whether nature does not endeavour to talk to us and tell us amazing secrets by the signs and ciphers of trees and ferns and herbs and flowers and hills and streams… the oak and the elm that we fell for our need may be wonderful signs: the brooks may indeed be books: the fern may be a great secret: the flower by the way the word of a great mystery: and whether we call the hills beautiful or dig coal from them, we may equally misunderstand their office.

The London Adventure p. 80 – Arthur Machen

Poets Catch Strange Glimpses Of Reality

2008-10-14T02:59:00.000-07:00

Photo - Margate Wandering 2008

I am afraid “wandering a little” is almost a hobby of mine - I began to consider whether, in this respect, London were the unique matter I had considered it. For, referring back the axiom to its most august origin: we are ready enough to confess – if we be not occultists, who know everything – that no man hath seen God at any time. But are we prepared to admit that no man hath seen anything at any time? Yet, this is most indubitably the truth. We see appearances and outward shows of things, symbols of all sorts; but we behold no essences, nor could we bear to behold them, if it were possible to do so… Tennyson [said] - that if any man could see a grain of wheat as it is in its essence, he would instantly become a raging maniac. We see nothing real, we can no more see anything real than we can take our afternoon tea in the white, central heat of a blast furnace. We see shadows cast by reality. The more foolish of us gather up some of the shadows and put them in saucepans and boil them and then strain: and find out that water is really H2O, which is true enough in its way, and will remain so: till it is found out that H2 is shorthand for ten distinct forces, while O is a universe of countless stars, all revolving in their eternal order about an unknown, unconjecturable orb. And this, again, will be a good working hypothesis - till, new discoveries call for an entire revision of all our notions on the subject. No; we see nothing at all; though poets catch strange glimpses of reality, now and then, out of the corners of their eyes.

The London Adventure p.69– Arthur Machen

Strangeness Which Is The Essence Of Beauty

2008-10-14T02:56:00.000-07:00

View from Primrose Hill - North London

Strangeness which is the essence of beauty is the essence of truth, and the essence of the world. I have often felt that, when the ascent of a long hill brought me to the summit of an undiscovered height in London; and I looked down on a new land.

The London Adventure p.127 Arthur Machen

The Question Of The Pattern

2008-10-14T02:52:00.001-07:00

Then the question of the pattern. (Compare with the whorl, the spiral, Maori decoration.) Why was this form common to all primitive art?

The problem perplexed him. He took it, as was his custom, for a long walk; and in the dreariest, most grey street of a grey, remote suburb, just as the men were coming home form the city, the thought, with a pang of joy, rushed into his mind, that the maze was not only the instrument, but the symbol of ecstasy: it was a pictured “inebriation,” the sign of some age-old “process” that gave the secret bliss to men, that was symbolised also by dancing, by lyrics with their recurring burdens, and their repeated musical phrases: a maze, a dance, a song: three symbols pointing to one mystery.

The London Adventure p. 89 – Arthur Machen

We Learn By Experience, Say The Good Men

2008-10-14T02:45:00.001-07:00

Photo - Margate Festival 2008

We learn by experience, say the good men; but I believe the fact to be that experience cause us to forget most things that are worth knowing … the sense of the eternal mysteries, the eternal beauty hidden beneath the crust of common and of commonplace things; hidden and yet burning and glowing continually if you care to look with purged eyes…

The London Adventure p.71 – Arthur Machen

Solitude and the Creative Person

2008-10-05T05:41:00.001-07:00

It is true that many creative people fail to make mature personal relationships, and some are extremely isolated. It is also true that, in some instances, trauma, in the shape of early separation or bereavement, has steered the potentially creative person toward developing aspects of his personality which can find fulfillment in comparative isolation. But this does not mean that solitary, creative pursuits are themselves pathological…

(A)voidance behavior is a response designed to protect the infant from behavioral disorganization. If we transfer this concept to adult life, we can see that an avoidant infant might very well develop into a person whose principal need was to find some kind of meaning and order in life which was not entirely, or even chiefly, dependent upon interpersonal relationships.

Solitude: A Return to the Self – Anthony Storr

Speed and Happiness

2008-10-05T05:34:00.000-07:00

I wanted movement and not a calm course of existence. I wanted excitement and danger and the chance to sacrifice myself for my love. I felt in myself a superabundance of energy which found no outlet in our quiet life.

Family Happiness – Leo Tolstoy

Creative Talent

2008-10-05T05:30:00.000-07:00

It may, after all, be the bad habit of creative talents to invest themselves in pathological extremes that yield remarkable insights but no durable way of life for those who cannot translate their psychic wounds into significant art or thought.

In Search of the Miraculous – Theodore Roszak

Life in the Woods

2008-10-05T05:19:00.000-07:00

Photo - Woods below Golden Cap, Dorset

Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. I sat at a table where were rich food and wine in abundance, an obsequious attendance, but sincerity and truth were not; and I went away hungry from the inhospitable board. The hospitality was as cold as the ices.

Walden, or Life in the Woods – Henry David Thoreau

Trails

2008-10-05T05:12:00.000-07:00

The physical domain of the country had its counterpart in me. The trails I made led outward into the hills and swamps, but they led inward also. And from the study of things underfoot, and from reading and thinking, came a kind of exploration, myself and the land. In time the two became one in my mind. With the gathering force of an essential thing realizing itself out of early ground, I faced in myself a passionate and tenacious longing – to put away thought forever, and all the trouble it brings, all but the nearest desire, direct and searching. To take the trail and not look back. Whether on foot, on snowshoes or by sled, into the summer hills and their late freezing shadows – a high blaze, a runner track in the snow would show where I had gone. Let the rest of mankind find me if it could.

The Stars, The Snow, The Fire: Twenty-Five Years in the Northern Wilderness – John Haines

An Ideal Stage

2008-10-05T05:10:00.000-07:00

Photo - Looking towards Mounts Bay, Kernow

Wilderness appealed to those bored or disgusted with man and his works. It not only offered an escape from society but also was an ideal stage for the Romantic individual to exercise the cult that he frequently made of his own soul. The solitude and total freedom of the wilderness created a perfect setting for either melancholy or exultation.

Wilderness and the American Mind - Robert Nash

Life as Sacrifice

2008-10-05T05:06:00.000-07:00

Mulfra Quoit

Now what is history? It is the centuries of systematic explorations of the riddle of death, with a view to overcoming death. That’s why people discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves, that’s why they write symphonies. Now, you can’t advance in this direction without a certain faith. You can’t make such discoveries without spiritual equipment. And the basic elements of this equipment are in the Gospels. What are they? To begin with, love one’s neighbour,, which is the supreme form of vital energy. Once it fills the heart of man it has to overflow and spend itself. And then the two basic ideals of modern man – without them this is unthinkable - the idea of free personality and the idea of life as sacrifice.

Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak

The Unhandselled Earth

2008-10-05T04:54:00.001-07:00

Looking towards Logan Rock - Treen

Nature was here something savage and awful, though beautiful. I looked with awe at the ground I trod on, to see what the Powers had made there, the form and fashion and material of their work. This was the Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night. Here was no man’s garden, but the unhandselled* globe. It was not lawn , nor pasture, nor mead, nor woodland, nor lea, nor arable, nor waste land. It was the fresh and natural surface of the planet Earth, as it was made forever and ever, - to be the dwelling of man, we say, - so Nature made it, and man may use it if he can. Man was not to be associated with it. It was Matter, vast, terrific, - not his Mother Earth that we have heard of, not for him to tread on, or to be buried in, - no, it were being too familiar even to let his bones lie there, - the home, this, of Necessity and Fate. There was clearly felt the presence of a force not bound to be kind to man. It was a place of heathenism and superstitious rites,- to be inhabited by men nearer of kin to the rocks and to wild animals than we… What is it to be admitted to a museum, to see a myriad of particular things, compared with being shown some star’s surface, some hard matter in its home! I stand in awe of my body, this matter to which I am bound has become so strange to me. I fear not spirits, ghosts, of which I am one, - that my body might, - but I fear bodies, I tremble to meet them. What is this Titan that has possession of me? Talk of mysteries! Think of our life in nature, - daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it, - rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! The actual world! The common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? Where are we?

Ktaadn - Henry David Thoreau
*handsel - v. To inaugurate the use of; to use for the first time; to be the first to test, try, prove, taste.

Dreaming

2008-10-05T04:27:00.000-07:00

Looking towards Porth Curno Beach

Reality is a thousand times more subtle and complicated, more labyrinthine in its retreats and evasions, than the dream-world of the most recondite idealist. It is also a thousand times more stark and bleak than the crudities of the most ferocious realists. It is both these, because it is the Protean offspring of the psychic embraces of every sensibility that exists with the original plastic life-stuff.

The Meaning of Culture - JCP p. 41

Beer & Chips

2008-10-05T04:22:00.000-07:00

On top a double decker bus heading for Sennen Cove

It is a memorable moment in one’s intellectual life when one realizes that it is not learning for learning’s sake, or knowledge for the sake of knowledge that is the object of our secret struggle with inertia and futility. It is simply that we may enjoy the most exciting sensations that life offers; and enjoy them over the longest possible extension of time. Among such sensations one of the most thrilling is that vague feeling of old countryside romance which emanates from certain far-off highways and certain remote villages. Standing upon some old stone bridge where the moss grows green and untouched on the curve of the dark arches above the water, one often feels that there is a silent unspeakable secret hovering about such places that no writer has ever really caught. Perhaps these are things that cannot be caught; but, if they ever are, it will be by a mind that has made of such memories a rich, dim background, a background full of supernatural power that has the strength to push back, if not to obliterate, the crude pressure of modern preoccupations. Such a mind was that of Emily Bronte. Even if your nature finds something monstrous and shocking about the physical brutalities in “Wuthering Heights” …(it) is indeed a terrific emanation – the breaking out of an electric storm – from that obscure reservoir of unexpressed yearnings that most hearts conceal under a thousand decorous masks. To lose the power of imaginative sympathy with their dark thunderous ways were to subside upon a sort of death-in-life! From such a death-in –life Emily Bronte exultantly releases us, as if she were herself on of those strange mythic figures in William Blake’s pictures.

The place occupied in the older times by poetry seems in our own day to be occupied by imaginative prose. The role of culture among modern minds must imply, therefore, an attempt to turn all the critical searchlights we can summon upon contemporary writings, choosing what stimulates us and avoiding what disintegrates and confuses us. The desirable effect upon one’s mind of imaginative literature is not to strengthen one’s memory or enlarge one’s learning, or to inspire one to gather together a collection of passages from “great authors”; it is to encourage one to learn the art of becoming a “great author” oneself; not in the sense of composing a single line, but in the sense of sufficiently detaching oneself from the chaotic spectacle of reality so as to catch on the wing that fleeting loveliness of which no genius has the monopoly and which only the stirred depths of one’s own deepest nature can prevail upon to pause in its eternal flight.

The Meaning of Culture – JCP, p. 38

The Meaning of Culture

2008-10-05T02:20:00.000-07:00

To realize the advantage that a person who loves books has over one who cares nothing for them, consider the contents of two separate human heads whirling through a New York subway tunnel. Both these heads are covered with hats. Both are staring helplessly at the subway advertisements. Both are swaying to and fro with a dense crowd of other human heads. Both are preserving an expression of democratic patience. But there the resemblance ends. The un-bookish head, likely enough endowed by Nature with a whimsical philosophy all of its own, has probably been so debauched but its daily reading of newspapers and magazines that its only humour consists in a pathetically standardised facetiousness. Such facetiousness is no doubt at this very moment playing grimly enough over very practical problems. The angry or the sarcastic words of our gentleman’s employer… the worry about his unpaid doctor or furious landlord… his wretched quarrel over God knows what, with his difficult sweetheart… such matter, gone over and over again in this harassed mind, throw their fretful patterns over the pictures of soap and tooth-paste and toilet-powder. On the other hand his thought may be complacent and self-satisfied; his curiosity piqued by some recent scandalous incident, may be pleasantly provoked to humorous ponderings. It is quite possible to live a busy, entertaining, and eminently respectable life, independent altogether of literature; but in such a case it will probably be concrete objects, realistic situations, external shocks rather than any kind of fanciful dreaming that will fill a person’s head.

But what about that other human skull? If one could visualise mental impressions one would be able to observe, floating in and out of this opaque, bony structure, how may airy clouds of fanciful craziness! This human head would doubtless in any case dream its dreams; but now, in its present pendulous position, when the charm of its own vision of things shrinks and wilts under reality at its worst, now is the moment when the imaginative worlds created by great geniuses, long ago dead, may, the mental will is strong enough, come to that poor head’s rescue. Under more normal conditions these imaginary “worlds” would serve, when our book-lover was remind of them, to rouse him to mould reality after his own secret pattern. But now, driven inwards, driven back upon itself, his mind struggles to fling the magic of these unrelated worlds, like a sorcerer’s hypnosis, over this whirling panorama of the raw and the crude. From Charles Lamb’s “Essays,” for example, why should he not be snatching something that might hover ironically and with a rich mellowness between himself and those rows of monotonous grey hats and black boots. The there would arise in that Manhattan tunnel a friendly assemblage of old-word humours, a fragrance, as it were of old folios, old wainscoted hall-ways, old gardens and purlieus of old college courts!

But more relevant perhaps to the nature of the motley spectacle before him might there not float and eddy round such a head quite a different host of airy sprites… the grotesque-sentimental population of Dickens’ reckless fancy? Weeping, chuckling, leering, grimacing, this cloud of lively hobgoblins might bear a resemblance to our traveller’s strap-supported neighbours. Hardly a photographic resemblance; a cerebral phantasmagoria rather, wherein a chance-tossed crowd of preoccupied New Yorkers is transformed into fairy-story ogres and angels!

But it is not only when in contact with the great outer world that a person’s saturation with literature thickens by a phalanx of portentous witnesses his vision of the familiar. Alone in one’s room of a late evening, bending over the fire, with the night sounds of the city or the night –silences of the country flowing through one’s absent-mindedness, how deeply does one’s inkling of the nature of life’s wild dream-stuff respond to the gestures of Dostoievsky’s fatality-masks! Let them beckon to us, these living figures, from amid their red coals! They are more than characters in fiction, these people of Dostoievsky. They are apocalyptic prophecies of psychic ecstasies, only to be revealed when some use-and-wont shutter of the human mind swings back in some Pentecostal wind….

…Down there, in those caverns of red coals, over which we dream, we, our very selves, will be watching all this; watching it and sharing in its monstrous terror. And how is t, that while from the wretched tales of contemporary brutality there only rises within us a wretched nausea of outrages nerves, or, at best, a simple human pity and indignation, there should mount up from these Dostoievsky tragedies a strange quivering beauty, that beyond all and in spite of all, seems to avenge and to absolve the human race? Is it that in the great moments of these heart-piercing novels we touch the fringe of some unguessed-at Absolute of feeling, which, in “the dark backward and abysm” of human suffering, hints at unspeakable consolation? Or is it simply that art itself, creating a reality beyond reality, turns with its demiurgic finger the intolerably pitiful into the symbolically tragic?

A person certainly does not realize all in a moment the influence that literature exerts over human minds, the power it has of transferring to one’s real experience that mythical heightening which it diffuses through its imaginary world. It is indeed only after we have saturated ourselves in these things, only after we have read these books over and over again, that the charm begins properly to work. But delayed though it may be, the moment will come at last when we find ourselves better able to cope with our won misadventures because of what we have caught, let us suppose from the heroic fantasies of the author of Don Quixote, or from the sly humours of the author of Tristram Shandy.

One of the most invaluable clues to that difficult casuistry that keeps the integrity of the ego intact amid the rough-and-tumble of life can be derived from the writings of Henry James. But neither does the spacious aroma of this high secret reveal itself at the first encounter; too diffused is it in the provocations of plot, too involved in the complications of character. By degrees, however,, as we read – say “The Golden Bowl” – for the second or third time, it dawns upon us that these punctilious and roundabout approaches to the quintessence of life, these wavering and reluctant moth-hoverings about the problems of good and evil, have a definitely significant worth in one’s personal adjudication of human values, as one goes through the world; a worth that, although implicated here with the cunning craftsmanship of a rich aesthetic creation, is in reality a redoubtable asset to the armoury of one’s own private life-weapons

The Meaning of Culture
John Cowper Powys p26

Raw Wilderness

2008-10-03T00:53:00.000-07:00

Dark Spruce forest frowned on either side the frozen waterway. The trees had been stripped by a recent wind of their white covering of frost , and they seemed to lean toward each other, black and ominous, in the fading light. A vast silence reigned over the land. The land itself was a desolation, a lifeless, without movement , so lone and cold that the spirit of it was not even that of sadness. There was a hint in it of laughter, but of a laughter more terrible than any sadness – a laughter that was mirthless as the smile of the Sphinx, a laughter cold as the frost and partaking of the grimness of infallibility. It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life. It was the Wild, the savage, frozen-hearted Northland Wild.

White Fang - Jack London

The Desert

2008-10-03T00:46:00.001-07:00

The desert is the environment of revelation, genetically and physiologically alien, sensorily austere, esthetically abstract, historically inimical… Its forms are bold and suggestive. The mind is beset by light and space, the kinesthetic novelty of the aridity, high temperature, and wind. The desert sky is encircling, majestic, terrible. In other habitats, the rim of sky above the horizontal is broken or obscured; here, together with the overhead portion, it is infinitely vaster than that of rolling countryside and forest lands… In an unobstructed sky the clouds seem more massive, sometimes grandly reflecting the earth’s curvature on their concave undersides. The angularity of desert landforms imparts a monumental architecture to the clouds as well as to the land…

To the desert go prophets and hermits; through deserts go pilgrims and exiles. Here the leaders of the great religions have sought the therapeutic and spiritual values of retreat, not to escape but to find reality.

Paul Shepard
Man in the Landscape
A Historic View of the Esthetics of Nature
Quoted from Into the Wild – Jon Krakauer

All Nature is your Congratulation

2008-10-02T06:18:00.001-07:00

Crossing the stream that runs down to Zennor
If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal, - that is your success. All nature is your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself. The greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated. We easily come to doubt if they exist. We soon forget them. They are the highest reality… the true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched.

Walden, or Life in the Woods - Henry David Thoreau
Quoted form: Into the wild - Jon Krakauer

Ruskiin delights in the Rhone

2008-09-07T03:44:00.000-07:00

For all other rivers there is a surface, and an underneath, and a vaguely displeasing idea of the bottom. But the Rhone flows like one lambent jewel; its surface is nowhere, its ethereal self is everywhere, the iridescent rush and translucent strength of it blue to the shore, and radiant to the depth.

Fifteen feet thick, of not flowing but flying water; not water, neither, - melted glacier, rather, one should call it; the force of the ice is with it, and the wreathing of the clouds, the gladness of the sky, and the continuance of Time.

Waves of clear sea are, indeed, lovely to watch, but they are always coming of gone, never in any taken shape to be seen for a second. But here was one mighty wave that was always itself, and every fluted swirl of it, constant as the wreathing of a shell. No wasting away of the fallen foam, no pause for gathering of power, no helpless ebb of discouraged recoil; but alike through bright day and lulling night, the never-pausing plunge, and never-fading flash, and never-hushing whisper, and, while the sun was up, the ever-answering glow of unearthly aquamarine, ultramarine, violet-blue, gentian-blue, peacock-blue, river-of-paradise blue, glass of a painted window melted in the sun, and the witch of the Alps flinging the spun tresses of it of ever from her snow.

The innocent way, too, in which the river used to stop to look into every little corner. Great torrents always seem angry, and great rivers too often sullen; but there is no anger, no distain, in the Rhone. It seemed as if the mountain stream was in mere bliss at recovering itself again out of the lake-sleep, and raced because it rejoiced in racing, fain yet to return and stay. There were pieces of wave that danced all day as if Perdita were looking on to learn; there were little streams that skipped like lambs and leaped like chamois; there were pools that shook the sunshine all through them, and were rippled in layers of overlaid ripples, like crystal sand; there were currents that twisted the light into golden braids, and inlaid the threads with turquoise enamel; there were strips of stream that had certainly above the lake been millstreams, and were looking busily for mills to turn again; there were shoots of stream that had once shot fearfully into the air, and now sprang up again laughing that they had only fallen a foot of two; - and in the midst of all the gay glittering and eddied lingering, the noble bearing by of the midmost depth, so mighty, yet so terrorless and harmless, with its swallows skimming instead of petrels, and the dear old decrepit town (Geneva) as safe in the embracing sweep of it as if it were set in a brooch of sapphire…

Praeterita John Ruskin Vol II
Pub: 1907 George Allen
Chapter V. The Simplon p 130

A Small Aspen Tree

2008-09-06T10:28:00.000-07:00

Whilst traveling to Chamouni and resting at Fontainebleau. An Encounter with a small Aspen tree on the road after feeling unwell.

… And today, I missed rocks, palace, and fountain all alike, and found myself lying on the bank of a cart-road in the sand, with no prospect whatever but that small aspen tree against the blue sky.

Languidly, but not idly, I began to draw it; and as I drew, the languor passed away: the beautiful lines insisted on being traced, - without weariness. More and more beautiful they became, as each rose out of the rest, and took its place in the air. With wonder increasing every instant, I saw that they ‘composed’ themselves, by finer laws than any known of men. At last, the tree was there, and everything that I had thought before about trees, nowhere…

IV Fontainebleau
Praeterita John Ruskin Vol II
Pub: 1907 George Allen page 110

As I look deeper into the mirror

2008-09-06T10:21:00.000-07:00

…as I look deeper into the mirror , I find myself a more curious person than I thought. I used to fancy that everybody would like clouds and rocks as well as I did, if once told to look at them; whereas, after fifty years of trial, I find that is not so, even in modern days; having long ago known that… the clouds and mountains which have been life to me, were mere inconvenience and horror to most of mankind…

Praeterita John Ruskin Vol II
Pub: 1907 George Allen
Chapter 1

The Art of Forgetting

2008-09-06T10:11:00.000-07:00

Its Snowing in Exeter

"Rather tired today. Its snowing in Exeter! Weather systems have gone mad - but it did look pretty. Woke up this morning after having an anxiety dream - I had to order a Chinese takeaway for a group of people, I kept loosing the list, muddles all round - great anxiety..,. you know the sort of thing. Its a petty situation but indicates where I am at the moment. It made me feel awful and depressed when I woke up - the art of forgetting when it is needed is essential. I need to forget about jobs and chores and money and schedules and look about me and think about silence and music, pictures and beauty, essences and nuances. Its quite an art to juggle it all about and not loose touch with the bit that pays the bills but keep the bit that feeds the soul."

Vicky Spring 08

The Promontory of Sesti di Levante

2008-09-06T09:58:00.000-07:00

The promontory of Sesti di Levante Nov 4^th 1840

…very wet all morning; merely able to get the four miles to this most lovely village, the clouds drifting like smoke from the hills, and hanging in wreaths about the white churches on their woody slopes. Kept in here till three, then the clouds broke, and we got up the woody promontory that overhangs the village. The clouds were rising gradually from the Apennines, fragments entangled here and there in the ravines catching the level sunlight like so many tongues of fire; the dark blue outline of the hills clear as crystal against a pale distant purity of green sky, the sun touching here and there upon their turfy precipices and the white, square villages along the gulph gleaming like silver to the north-west; - a mass of higher mountain, plunging down into broad valleys dark with olive, their summits at first grey with rain, then deep blue with flying showers – the sun suddenly catching the near woods at their base, already coloured exquisitely by the autumn, with such a burst of robbing, - penetrating, glow as Turner only could even imagine, set off by the grey storm behind. To the south, an expanse of sea, varied by reflection of white Apline cloud, and delicate lines of most pure blue, the low sun sending its line of light – forty miles long – from the horizon; the surges dashing far below against rocks of black marble, and lines of foam drifting back with the current into the open sea. Overhead, a group, of dark Italian pine and evergreen oak, with such lovely ground about their roots as we have in the best bits of the islands of Derwentwater. This continued till near sunset, when a tall double rainbow rose to the east over the fiery woods, and as the sun sank, the storm of falling rain on the mountains became suddenly purple – nearly crimson; the rainbow, its hues scarcely traceable, one broad belt of crimson, the clouds above all fire. The whole scene such as can only come once or twice in a lifetime…

Praeterita John Ruskin Vol II
Pub: 1907 George Allen
III Cumae p61

The Ancient God's Lament

2008-06-24T13:04:00.000-07:00

" I want you...because the world has forgotten me. In all my nation there is no remembrance of me. I , wandering on the hills of my country, am lonely indeed. I am the desolate god forbidden to utter my happy laughter. I hide the silver of my speech and the gold of my merriment. I live in the holes of the rocks and the dark caves of the sea. I weep in the morning because I may not laugh, and in the evening I go abroad and am not happy. Where I have kissed a bird has flown; where I have trod a flower has sprung. But Thought has snared my birds in his nets and sold them in the market-places. Who will deliver me from Thought, from the base holiness of Intellect, the maker of chains and traps? Who will save me from the holy impurity of Emotion, whose daughters are Envy and Jealousy and Hatred, who plucks my flowers to ornament her lusts and my little leaves to shrivel on the breasts of infamy? Lo, I am sealed in the caves of nonentity until the head and the heart shall come together in fruitfulness, until Thought has wept for Love, and Emotion has purified herself to meet her lover. Tir-na-nOg is the heart of a man and the head of a woman. Widely they are separated. Self-centred they stand, and between them the seas of space are flooding desolately. No eye can bridge them, not any desire bring them together until the blind god shall find them on the wavering stream - not as an arrow searches straightly from a bow, but gently, imperceptibly as a feather on the wind reaches the ground on a hundred starts; not with the compass and the chart, but by the breath of the Almighty which blows from all quarters without care and without ceasing. Night and day it urges from the outside to the inside. It gathers ever to the centre. From the far without to the deep within, trembling from the body to the soul until the head of a woman and the heart of a man are filled with the Divine Imagination. Hymen, Hymenaea! I sing to the ears that are stopped, the eyes that are sealed and the minds that do not labour. Sweetly I sing on the hill-side. The blind shall look within and not without; the deaf shall hearken to the murmur of their wisdom of sweetness; the thoughtless shall think without effort as the lightning flashes, that the hand of Innocence may reach to the stars, and the feet of Adoration may dance to the Father of Joy and the laugh of Happiness be answered by the Voice of Benediction..."

The Crock of Gold - James Stephens 1912

The Dance Has Begun Lightly

2008-06-23T12:45:00.000-07:00

"Come to us, ye who do not know where ye are - ye who live among strangers in the houses of dismay and self-righteousness. Poor, awkward ones! How bewildered and bedevilled ye go! Amazed ye look and do not comprehend, for your eyes are set upon a star and your feet move in the blessed kingdoms of the Shee. Innocents! in what prisons are ye flung? To what lowliness are ye bowed? How are ye ground between the laws and the customs? The dark people of the Fomor have ye in thrall; and upon your minds they have fastened a band of lead, your hearts are hung with iron, and about your loins a cincture of brass impressed, woeful! believe it, that the sun does shine, the flowers grow, and the birds sing pleasantly in the trees. The free winds are everywhere, the water tumbles on the hill, the eagle calls aloud through the solitude, and his mate comes speedily. The bees are gathering honey in the sunlight, the midges dance together, and the great bull bellows across the river. The crow says a word to his brethren, and the wren snuggles her young in the hedge... Come to us, ye lovers of life and happiness. Hold out thy hand - a brother shall seize it from afar. Leave the plough and the cart for a little time: put aside the needle and the awl! - Is leather thy brother, O man?... Come away! come away! from the loom and the desk, from the place where raiment is sold and the place where it is sewn in darkness: O bad treachery! Is it for joy you sit in the broker's den, thou pale man? Has the attorney enchanted thee?... Come away! for the dance has begun lightly , the wind is sounding over the hill, the sun laughs down into the valley, and the sea leaps upon the shingle, panting for joy, dancing, dancing, dancing for joy..."

...They swept through the goat tracks and the little boreens and the curving roads. Down to the city they went dancing and singing; among the streets and the shops telling their sunny tale; not heeding the malignant eyes and the cold brows as the sons of Balor looked sidewards. And they took the Philosopher from his prison, even the Intellect of Man they took from the hands of the doctors and lawyers, from the sly priests, from the professors whose mouths are gorged with sawdust, and the merchants who sell blades of grass - the awful people of the Fomor... and then they returned again, dancing and singing, to the country of the gods...

The Crock of Gold - James Stephens 1912

The Spacegoats - In Celebration

The Road to Fairyland

2008-06-23T12:24:00.000-07:00

The Fairy Glen - Isle of Skye
Do you seek the road to Fairyland? I'll tell: it's easy quite. Wait till a yellow moon gets up o'er purple seas by night, and glides a shining pathway that is sparkling diamond bright. Then, if no evil power be nigh to thwart you, out of spite, and if you know the very words to cast a spell of might, you get upon a thistledown, and, if the breeze is right, you sail away to Fairyland along this track of light.
Ernest Thompson Seton

...With wonder, with delight, the daughter of Murrachu watched the hosting of the Shee. Sometimes her eyes were dazzled as a jewelled forehead blazed in the sun, or a shoulder-torque of broad gold flamed like a torch. On fair hair and dark the sun gleamed: white arms tossed and glanced a moment and sank and reappeared. The eyes of those who did not hesitate nor compute looked into her eyes, not appraising, not questioning, but mild and unafraid. The voices of free people spoke in her ears and the laughter of happy hearts, unthoughtful of sin or shame, released from the hard bondage of selfhood. For these people, though many, were one. Each spoke to the other as to himself, without reservation or subterfuge. They moved freely each in his personal whim, and they moved also with the unity of one being: for when they shouted to the Mother of the gods they shouted with one voice, and they bowed to her as one man bows. Through the many minds there went also one mind, correcting, commanding, so that in a moment the itnerchangeable and fluid became locked, and organic with a simultaneous understanding, a collective action - which was freedom...

... In a little they reached the grass land and the dance began. Hand sought for hand, feet moved companionably as thought they loved each other; quietly intimate they tripped without faltering, and, then, the loud song arose - they dang to the lovers of gaiety and peace, long defrauded - ...

The Crock of Gold - James Stephens 1912

The Faeiry Dance

2008-06-23T11:39:00.000-07:00

...And one came also to whom the bosts shouted with mighty love, wven the Serene One, Dana, the Mother of the gods, steadfast forever. Her breath is on the morning, her smile is summer. From her hand the birds of the air take their food. The mild ox is her friend, and the wolf trotos by her freindly side; atr her voice the daisy peeps from her cave and the nettle couches his lance. The rose arrays herself in innocence, scattering abroad her sweetness with the dew, and the oak tree laughs to her in the air. Tous Beautiful! the lambs follow thy footsteps, they crop thy bounty in the meadows and are not thwarted: the weary men cling to thy bosom everlasting. Through thee all voices come to us, even the Divine Pormise and the breath of the Almighty from afar laden with goodness.

With wonder, with delight, the daughter of Murrachu watched the hosting of the Shee. Sometimes her eyes were dazzled as a jewelled forenead blazed in the sun, or a shoulder-torque of broad gold flamed like a torch. On fair hair and dark the sun gleamed: white arms tossed and glanced a moment and sank and reappeared. The eyes of those who did not hesitate nor compute looked into her eyes, not appraising, not questioning, but mild and unafraid. The voices of free people spoke in her ears and the laughter of happy hearts, unthoughtful of sin or shame, released from the hard bondage of selfhood. For these people, though many, were one. Each spoke to the other as to himself, without reservation or subterfuge. They moved freely each in his personal whim, and they moved also with the unity of one being: for when they shouted tot he Moth of the gods thye shouted with one voice, and they bowed to her as one man bows. Through the many minds there went also one mind, correcting, commanding, so that in a moment the interchangeable and fluid became locked, and orgnaic with a simultaneous understanding, a collective action - which was freedom...

Here there wsa no green thing growing; a carpet of brown turf soread to the edge of sight on the sloping plain and way to where another mountain soared in the air. They came to this and descended. In the distance, groves fo trees could be seen, and, very far away, the roofs and towers and spires of the Town of the Ford of Hurdles, and the little roads that wandered everywhere; but on this height there was only prickly furze growing softly in the sunlight; the bee droned his loud song, the birds flew and sang occasionally, and the little stredams grew heavy with their falling waters. A little further and the bushes were green and heautiful, waving their gentle leaves in the quietude, and beyond again, wrapped in sunshine and peace, the trees looked on the world from their calm heights, having no complaint to make of anything.

In a little they reached the grass land and the dance began. Hand sought for hand, feet moved companionably as thought they loved each other; quietly intimate they tripped without faltering, and, then, the loud song arose - they sang to the lvoers of gaiety and peace, long defrauded -...

The Crock of Gold - James Stephens 1912

Love

2008-06-23T05:25:00.000-07:00

...she had discovered that happiness is not laughter or satisfaction, and that no person can be happy for themselves alone. So she had come to understand the terrible sadness of the gods, and why Angus wept in secret; for often in the night she had heard him weeping, and she knew that his tears were for those others who were unhappy, and that he could not be comforted while there was a woeful person or an evil deed hiding in the world. Her own happiness also had become infected with this alien misery, until she knew that nothing was alien to her, and that in truth all persons and all things were her brothers and sisters and that they were living and dying in distress; and at the last she knew that there was not any man but mankind, nor any human being but only humanity. Never again could the gratification of a desire give her pleasure, for her sense of oneness was destroyed - she was not an individual only; she was also part of a mighty organism ordained, through whatever stress, to achieve its oneness, and this great being was threefold, comprising in its mighty units God and Man and Nature - the immortal trinity. The duty of life is the sacrifice of self: it is to renounce the little ego that the mighty ego may be freed; and, knowing this, she found at last that she knew Happiness, that divine discontent which cannot rest nor be at ease until its bourne is attained and the knowledge of a man is added to the gaiety of a child. Angus had told her that beyond this there lay the great ecstasy which is Love and God and the beginning and the end of all things; for every thing must come from the Liberty into the Bondage, that it may return again to the Liberty, comprehending all things and fitted for that fiery enjoyment. This cannot be until there are no more fools living, for until the last fool has grown wise wisdom will totter and freedom will still be invisible. Growth is not by years but by multitudes, and until there is a common eye no one person can see God, for the eye of all nature will scarcely be great enough to look upon that majesty. We shall greet Happiness by multitudes, but we can only greet Him by starry systems and a universal love...

The Crock of Gold, James Stephens 1912

The Very Apex of Sweetness

2008-06-17T05:47:00.000-07:00

...when suddenly, from without , a chorus of birds burst into joyous singing. Limpid and liquid cadenzas, mellow flutings, and the sweet treble of infancy met and danced and piped in the airy surroundings. A round, soft tenderness of song rose and fell, broadened and soared, and then the high flight was snatched, eddied a moment, and was borne away to a more slender and wonderful loftiness, until, from afar, that thriling song turned on the very apex of sweetness, dipped steeply and flashed its joyous return to the exultations of its mates below, rolling an ecstasy of song which for one moment gladdened the whole world and the sad people who moved thereon...

The Crock of Gold, James Stephens 1912

The Depths are Equal to the Heigths

2008-06-10T06:35:00.000-07:00

...I want you to want me. I want you to forget right and wrong; to be as happy as the beasts, as careless as the flowers and the birds. To live to the depths of your nature as well as to the heights. Truly there are stars in the heights and they will be a garland for your forehead. But the depths are equal to the heights. Wondrous deep are the depths, very fertile is the lowest deep. There are stars there also , brighter than the stars on high. The name of the heights is Wisdom and the name of the depths is Love. How shall they come together and be fruitful if you do not plunge deeply and fearlessly? Wisdom is the spirit and the wings of the spirit, Love is the shaggy beast that goes down. Gallantly he dives, below thought, beyond Wisdom, to rise again as high above these as he had first descended. Wisdom is righteous and clean, but Love is unclean and holy. I sing of the beast and the descent: the great unclean purging itself in fire: the thought that is not born in the measure or the ice of the head, but in the feet and the hotblood and the pulse of fury. The Crown of Life is not lodged in the sun: the wise gods have buried it deeply where the thoughtful will not find it, nor the good: but the Gay Ones, the Adventurous Ones, the Careless Plungers, they will bring it to the wise and astonish them. All things are seen in the light – How shall we value that which is easy to see? But the precious things which are hidden, they will be beautiful with our sorrow: they will be noble because of our desire for them…

The Crock of Gold - James Stephens 1912

The End of the Road

2008-06-10T03:31:00.000-07:00

This is a thing is true,
Everything comes to an end:
The loving of me and you,
The walking of friend and friend

Shall I weep the beauty I knew,
Or the greatness gathered away
Or the truth that is only true,
As the things that a man will say?

The child and the mother will die,
The wife and the husband sever,
The sun will go out of the sky,
And the rain will be falling for ever.

For ever until the waves rear
To the skies with a terrible tune,
And cover the earth and air,
And climb up the beach of the moon.

They go, for all things must end,
And this is true as I say –
A friend will be leaving a friend,
And a man will be going away.

James Stephens The Hill of Visions
Maunsel and Company Ltd, 1912

The Spalpeen

2008-06-10T03:26:00.000-07:00

Looking on the rounded sky
From the Hill of Vision, I
Saw him striding here and there
Sowing seeds upon the air,
And he told the name of these,
Days and Years and Centuries.

Then a seed to me he threw
Saying, ‘tis a gift of you,
The best of all the seeds that be
This is the seed of mystery,
And its name is Death but no
Other tree can blossom so.

It will top the clouds and run
Branches up into the sun:
Fruit and leaf and branch and stem
Will grow far too high for them,
The immortals, who will cry
We are tired and cannot die.

“ Fear of the Gods” will be its name,
it will cover up their fame;
and beneath its shade will go
mighty mortals to and fro
who will die and live and be
eager through eternity.

James Stephens The Hill of Visions
Maunsel and Company Ltd, 1912

Through The Circle Of My Eye

2008-06-10T03:21:00.000-07:00

Everything that I can spy through the circle of my eye, everything that I can see has been woven out of me; I have sown the stars, and threw clouds of morning and of eve up into the vacant blue; everything that I perceive, sun and sea and mountain high, all are moulded by my eye: closing it, what shall I find? …

James Stephens The Hill of Visions
Maunsel and Company Ltd, 1912

Lijst

2008-04-30T12:51:00.000-07:00

R.L. Stevenson, Kidnapped
N. Stephenson, Snow Crash
E.O. Gordon, Prehistoric London: Its Circles and Mounds
D. Lessing, The Wind Blows Away Our Words
R. Jeffries, The Story of My Heart
C. Ross, 1920’s London
P. Stanford, The Devil
J. Bate, Song of the Earth
M.V. Morton, In Search of England
M.V. Morton, In Search of Scotland
J.K. Jerome, Idle Thoughts of An Idle Fellow
A. Elon, Jerusalem: City of Mirrors
J. Cope, The Modern Antiquarian
F. Pryor, Seahenge
F. Thompson, Lark Rise
R. Monk, Wittgenstein: Portrait of Genius
M. Peake, Titus Groan
L. Shlain, The Alphabet versus the Goddess
J.-P. Sartre, Nausea
M.V. Morton, Travels in the Land of the Bible
M. Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime
A.N. Wilson, Jesus: A Life
M. Peake, Gormeghast
H. Hesse, The Glass Bead Game
H. Beloc, The Old Road
L. Durrell, Bitter Lemons
D.E. Duncan, The Calendar
D. Watkins-Pitchford (‘BB’), The Little Grey Men
M. Peake, Titus Alone
Anon, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
B. Chatwin, The Songlines
J. Cope, The Megalithic European
V. Woolf, The Waves
F. Thompson, Over to Candleford
J. Crowley, Little, Big
F. Thompson, Candleford Green
C.J. Stone & A. Pendragon, The Trials of Arthur
anon. - Genesis
M. Moorcock, Elric at the End of Time
L. Durrell, Blue Thirst
M.-L. von Franz, The Feminine in Fairy Tales
G. Ashe – King Arthur’s Avalon
J.R.R. Tolkien – Tree and Leaf
G. Ashe – The Finger and the Moon
G.K. Chesterton – The New Jerusalem
A. Machen – The London Adventure
St. John the Divine – Revelation
R.W. Emerson – essays, never finished
T. Browne – Essay
H. Massingham – Downland Man
A. Letcher – Shroom

A Song for Mothers Day

2008-04-12T08:23:00.000-07:00

By Claudia

Your house is covered in pictures
Like sprinkled memories kept safe like holy scriptures
The scissors that rest next to the sink
you use to snip away at your hair marked by the finger prints
your strumming on the plastic guitar
isn't quite at good as your attempts to steal my nice Fender
I like your fish pie, its the best
damn thing I have eaten - but I hate the way you season

I don't have much money to give
but boy if I did
I would buy you a house
in the posh end of town
where we would keep bees
and pick apples off trees
you could paint things all day
and have scones on a tray
with plenty of cream
just you and me
I'll just have to give you my love instead

Your shrieks are music to my ears
I hear them everyday and will keep on listening for years
that tea its also the best in the world
we really should get used to using one of our numerous teapots
your walks carry on for miles
I've lost count of the amount of pivotal points you've visited
old books I swear you're under their spell
the mounds of pointless reads piling up like blocks of flats

I don't have much money to give
but boy if I did
I would buy you a house
in the posh end of town
where we would keep bees
and pick apples off trees
you could paint things all day
and have scones on a tray
with plenty of cream
just you and me
I'll just have to give you my love instead

Claudia Amarylis March 2008

Cybele and Leaves in the Wind

2008-04-12T08:21:00.000-07:00

13th century B.C. Hittite statue of Cybele on the slopes of the Mount Sipylus in Manisa, Turkey

… For the great goddess Cybele, whose forehead is crowned with the turrets of the Impossible, moves through the generations from one twilight to another; and of her long journeying from cult to cult, from shrine to shrine, from revelation to revelation, there is no end. Mountains have rolled down upon many of her temples. The depths of the Atlantic and Pacific have gathered others into their dim silt and monstrous slime at the bottom of the world. The obliterating sand storms of the desert have buried not a few. Some are lost in the untraversed forests of the new hemisphere. The days of the years of men’s lives are like leaves upon the wind and like ripples upon the water; but wherever the Tower-bearing Goddess moves, journeying from one madness of Faith to another, these pinnacles of desperation mount up again.

The builders of Stonehenge have perished; but here are those who worship its stones still. The builders of Glastonbury have perished; but here are people, yet living among us, whose eyes have seen the Grail. The ribs of our ancient earth are riddled with desperate pieties; her hollow caves are scooped out with frantic asseverations; and the end is not yet.

The Towers of Cybele still move in the darkness from cult to cult, from revelation to revelation. Made of a stuff more lasting than granite, older than basalt, harder than marble, and yet as insubstantial as the airiest mystery of thought, these Towers of the journeying Mother still trouble the dreams of men with their tremulous up-rising. Bowed beneath the desolation of futility, eaten by the worm of despair, these tragic Towers still rise from our planet’s surface, still sway disconsolately in the wind of its orbit, still gleam cold and white under its recurrent moons…

…The powers of reason and science gather in the strong light of the Sun to beat her down. But evermore she rises again , moving from the mists of dawn to the mists of twilight, passing through the noon-day like the shadow of an eclipse and through the midnight like an unblown trumpet, until she finds the land that has called her and the people whose heart she along can fill.

For the turrets upon the head of Cybele are made of those strange second thought of all the twice-born in the world; the liberated thoughts of men as they return from their labour and the brooding thoughts of women as they pause in the midst of their work. The powers of reason may number the Stones of Stonehenge and guess at the origin of the Grail of Glastonbury; but they cannot explain the mystery of the one, nor ask the required magic questions of the to her.

No man has seen Our lady of the Turrets as She moves over the land, from twilight to twilight; but those “ topless towers” of hers are the birth-cries of occult generation, raised up in defiance of Matter, in defiance of Fate, and in defiance of cruel knowledge and despairing wisdom.

Men may deride them, tear them down. They may drive their engines though the ruins of Glastonbury and their airplanes over the Stones of Stonehenge.

Still in the strength of the Unknown Dimension the secret of these places is carried forward to the unborn, their oracles to our children’s children.

For She whom the ancients named Cybele is in reality that beautiful and terrible Force by which the Lies of great creative Nature give birth to Truth that is to be.

Out of the Timeless she came down into time. Out of the Un-named she came down into our human symbols.

Through all the stammerings of strange tongues and murmurings of obscure invocations she still upholds her cause; the cause of the unseen against the seen, of the weak against the strong, of that which is not, and yet is, against that which is, and yet is not. Thus she abides; her Towers forever rising, forever vanishing. Never or Always.

THE END

A Glastonbury Romance

Between the Imaginations of Men

2008-04-12T08:19:00.000-07:00

…Between the imaginations of men, especially such as are stirred up and made tense by wrestlings with the Unknown, and the geographical pattern of the earth’s surface, are subtle correspondencies that may survive many sunken torch flares and many lost harp notes once heard across the capes and promontories.

A Glastonbury Romance
page 1064

The Male and Female

2008-03-30T01:00:00.000-07:00

The female is the earth, the sky, the rocks, everything that is and is latent. The Male is the wizard that brings the life. The magic wand sprinkles and ignites the life force and life 'happens'. Trees, buds, flowers, animals, they spread upon the earth. The magician creates and observes, the mother nurtures with her insight. The magician needs the nurture too - he is not equal to the 'mother' but is essential. Without him the mother would just be forever latent.

VH 2008

The Ultimate

2008-03-28T13:03:00.000-07:00

...Both the two great forces pouring forth from the double-natured First Cause possess the energy of sex. One is creative, the other destructive; one is good, the other evil; one loves, the other hates. But through both of them pours forth the magnetic energy that moves and disturbs the lethargy of Matter. Both of them have abysmal levels in their being that transcend all that we at present know of the duality of life and death.

There is no ultimate mystery! Such a phrase is meaningless, because the reality of Being is forever changing under the primal and arbitrary will of the First Cause. The mystery of mysteries is Personality, a living Person; and there is that in Personality which is indetermined, unaccountable, changing at every second! The Hindu philosophies that dream of the One, the Eternal, as an Ultimate behind the arbitrariness of Personal Will are deluded. They are in reality - although they talk of "Spirit" - under the bondage of the idea of the body and under the bondage of the idea of physical matter as an "ultimate."

Apart from Personality, apart from Personal Will, there is no such "ultimate" as Matter, there is no such "ultimate" as Spirit. Beyond Life and beyond Death there is Personality, dominating both Life and Death to its own arbitrary and wilful purposes.

What mortals call Sex is only a manifestation in human life, and in animal and vegetable life, of a certain spasm, a certain delicious shudder, a certain orgasm of a purely psychic nature, which belongs to the Personality of the First Cause.

There are human minds - and they find it easy to hypnotise the shallowly clever - who apply to the primordial mysteries of life and sex certain erudite names, and by this naming, and by the noting of certain sequences, they think things are explained. Nothing is explained. The only causal energy in Nature is the energy of the double-natured First Cause and of the innumerable lesser personalities whose existence is revealed in the unrolling of Time. And the ecstatic quiver of that great cosmic ripple we call Sex runs through the whole universe and functions in every organism independent of external objects of desire!

Parthenogenesis, as Christian clairvoyance has long ago defined it, is a symbol of what the soul constantly achieves. So are the Dragon's Teeth sown by Cadmus; and the pebbles cast behind them by Deucalion and Pyrrha.

The composers of fiction aim at an aesthetic verisimilitude which seldom corresponds to the much more eccentric and chaotic dispositions of Nature. Only rarely are such writers so torn and rent by the Demon within them that they can add their own touch to the wave-crests of real actuality as these foam up, bringing wreckage and sea-tangle and living and dead ocean monsters and bloody spume and bottom silt into the rainbow spray!

They intersperse their "comic" and their "tragic" in a manner quite different - so hard is it to throw off the clinging conventions of human tradition! - from the ghastly monotonies and sublime surprises that Nature delights in.

All through, all conscious feelings belonging to living organisms, in a particular spot upon the earth's rondure, mount up and radiate outward from such a spot, overtaking in their ascent the sound-eidola and the sight-eidola which accompany them!

A Glastonbury Romance - page 666
John Cowper Powys

The Grail

2008-03-21T07:16:00.000-07:00

I know now… what the Grail is. It is something that has been dropped upon our planet, dropped within the earthly atmosphere that surround Glastonbury, dropped from Somewhere Else…

I don’t know… of what substance this thing is made; or whether it was flung into our material dimension purposely, or by accident, or by…it is evidently possessed of radiations that can affect both our souls and …Everyone who believes in it increases its power. That, at least, is clear – wherever it came from!…

Sometimes in dreams… some little inanimate thing becomes terrible to us… becomes tremendous and terrible…producing ghastly shiverings and cold sweats…Little inanimate things…can become great symbols… Certain material objects can become charged with supernatural power…They can get filled with a kind of electricity that’s more than magnetism!… This is especially the case when a number of people, century after century has believed…

…Thought is a real thing -…it is a live thing. It creates; it destroys; it begets; it projects its living offspring. Like certain forms of physical pain thought can take organic shapes. They can live and grow and generate, independently of the person in whose being they originated…

For a thousand years the Grail has been attracting thought to itself, because of the magnetism of Christ’s Blood. The Grail is now an organic nucleus of creation and destruction. Christ’s Blood cries aloud from it by day and by night… It is the desire of the generations mingling like water with the Blood of Christ, and caught in a fragment of Substance that is beyond Matter! It is a little nucleus of Eternity, dropped somehow from the outer space upon one particular spot!…

A Glastonbury Romance

John Cowper Powys - page 456

In Search of the Kenwardstone

2008-03-15T10:43:00.000-07:00

In Search of the Kenward stone - Chute Causeway

http://www.wiltshire.gov.uk/community/getconcise.php?id=60
http://www.kenwardandson.co.uk/
http://www.themodernantiquarian.com/site/6611/kenward_stone.html

Ken Watts in "Exploring Historic Wiltshire" records that a 19th century farm labourer recalled moving the stone from Kinwardstone Farm at Burbage 5 miles away. However it seems odd to move a large stone this distance to such a remote spot when field clearances normally involved moving sarsens to the edge of a field or breaking them up. Kinwardstone itself is the name of the local medieval hundred.

The stone is highly unusual and only a geologist can determine whether the markings are natural or man made. Some sarsens carry striations caused by glacial movement and the lines look less clearly man made than the grooves for example on the Polissoir Stone at Avebury.

The stone lies at the edge of a pit (which may relate to the building of the adjacent Roman road along Chute Causeway). There are three sarsens in the Churchyard at Tangley (St Thomas of Canterbury) and remnants of a sarsen chambered tomb at Tidcombe longbarrow a mile away.

Kinwardstone Conferencing. http://www.kinwardstone.co.uk/venuefindingservice.htm

Visitors to our offices are often impressed with our collection of "Do Not Disturb" signs. It began about 15 years ago and now features several hundred examples of this often neglected art form. They have come from as near as Marlborough and as far as Mongolia and Bali so if you would like to contribute to our collection please post us any that you come across - they will be very much appreciated.

People also ask about our name.- Kinwardstone. It is now unique to Burbage and the following is a short explanation of its probable origin:

England's administrative system was established during the Saxon period. They created the Shires (controlled by the Shire Reeve or Sheriff), which were in turn divided into Hundreds, but the latter's power gradually declined until they were replaced by the District Councils in 1894. Typically, the Hundred's elders met monthly at an open place to consider local criminal offences, minor ecclesiastical matters and to levy local taxes. Wiltshire was divided into about 40 Hundreds of which Kinwardstone was the second largest. It's Court reputedly originally met at a now ploughed out tumuli in a field near Kinwardstone Farm, Burbage. In later years they more sensibly met at the White Hart Inn, Burbage.

The name probably came from a local Saxon royal (or 'cyne') called Werstan or Wickstan who achieved victory over Ethelmund, Earl of Worcester, about 800AD. It is claimed that a stone was erected on Chute Causeway in celebration of his victory and our logo is derived from its carvings.

Om

2008-03-15T09:16:00.001-07:00

A Union

2008-03-15T09:05:00.000-07:00

…Towards her lover’s high-pitched worship a woman can grow as tenderly humorous as the slyest cynic in the world. His infatuated rapture in her beauty becomes as nothing, in comparison with the desperate sweetness of her surrender to him. There are levels of feminine emotion in the state of love entirely and forever unknown to men. Man’s imaginative recognition of feminine charm, man’s greedy lust, man’s pride in possession, man’s tremulous sense of the pathos of femininity, man’s awe in the presence of an abysmal mystery – all these feelings exist in a curious detachment in his consciousness. They are all separate from the blind subcurrent that sweeps the two together. But with women, when they are really giving themselves up without reserve, a deep underflow of abandonment is reached, where such detachment from Nature ceases completely. At such times the woman does not feel herself to be beautiful or desirable. She does not feel her lover to be handsome or strong or clever or brave. She might be the more abject of the daughters of her race. He might be the least admirable of the sons of his race. His body, his face, might be contemptible. She has reached a level of emotion where everything about him is accepted and taken for granted; and not only so, but actually seen for what it is, without a flicker of idealism. She has reached a level wherein sublime, unconscious humility she takes as her possessor this image, this simulacrum, this poor figure of earth; and as she does so, she accepts in exactly the same way her own most grievous limitations, discounting ironically and tenderly, with an understanding that is deeper than cynicism itself, all his erotic amorous illusions.

There is thus, in a woman’s love, when it has sunk to this level, no illusion left. He is what he is and she may be what she may be! Inform, cowardly, conceited, stupid, he is her man. She has given herself to him as a free gift. He is her possessor. She belongs now, not to herself, but to him. The danger implicit in this implicitness of a woman’s love, when she really gives herself up, is that a man should get a glimpse of its sublime realism. Architect of illusion as he is, it is only in the full volume and top crest of his love that a man can bear an inkling of how realistically his woman regards him below the surface of her flattery. His love for her will probably weaken before hers does for him. And this will happen just because his love depends on an exaggerated admiration of her, which, if he id not something of a Don Quixote, will pass away by degrees. The tragic danger of the “absoluteness” of her love will arrive when he has really got tired of her and has come to regard her as a stranger to his mind and a burden upon his spirit. At this point his vanity will soon teach him, and her “crossness” and “sensitiveness” will soon teach him, that she is completely free from every illusion about his personality. And then another element will enter. The slow cooling of his love for her will rouse in the woman a blind anger; an anger directed, not so much against the poor, weak man himself, as against all men, and incidentally against all the laws of Nature; and yielding to this anger she will not care how much she hurts his feelings. Let him suffer a little on the surface – which is all he understands! – while she is suffering such tortures in the depths! In this mood how can she resist taking advantage of her knowledge of his character? How can she help prodding and stinging him where she knows it will hurt the most?

What in any woman renders a union lasting is the power of letting her man see that she likes him extremely in addition to loving him. What in any man renders a union lasting is this element of the rational-irrational “Don Quixote” in his mind and soul. And wherein consists this Don Quixote element? It consists in an act of the imaginative will; an act of the man’s soul that is actually creative; an act by means of which he sets up his particular Dulcinea del Toboso in an indestructible and imperishable niche. The act of the imaginative will to which I refer gives a man , in fact, the power to treat his woman, in her lifetime, as if she were dead…which is the rarest essence of human relationship and the supreme triumph over mater of the human spirit…

A Glastonbury Romance
John Cowper Powys

Sulphur Cinquefoil

2008-03-15T08:21:00.000-07:00

Very nice!

Do What Thou Wilt

2008-03-15T08:03:00.000-07:00

The unicursal hexagram, is one of the key symbols within Thelema, the tradition founded by Aleister Crowley in the early part of the twentieth-century. Crowley did not invent the unicursal hexagram, the emblem was created by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and adapted by Crowley for his own use.

Crowley's adaptation of the unicursal hexagram placed a five petaled rose, symbolizing a pentacle (and the divine feminine), in the center; the symbol as a whole making eleven (five petals of the rose plus six points of the hexagram), the number of divine union.

Combined with the Marian Rose, the unicursal hexagram becomes Crowley's personal sigil, which is the magical union of 5 and 6 giving 11, the number of magick and new beginnings.

When Crowley introduces the unicursal hexagram in his The Book of Thoth he writes that "The lines, however, are strictly Euclidean; they have no depth.

Thelema is a philosophy of life based on the rule or law, "Do what thou wilt." The ideal of "Do what thou wilt" and its association with the word Thelema goes back to François Rabelais, but was more fully developed and proselytized by Aleister Crowley,who founded a religion named Thelema based on this ideal. The word itself is the English transliteration of the Koine Greek noun θέλημα: "will", from the verb θέλω: to will, wish, purpose. Early Christian writings use the word to refer to the will of God, the human will, and even the will of God's opponent, the Devil.

In the 16th century, François Rabelais used Thélème, the French form of the word, as the name of a fictional Abbey in his famous books, Gargantua and Pantagruel. The only rule of this Abbey was "fay çe que vouldras" ("Fais ce que tu veux," or, "Do what thou wilt"). This rule was revived and used in the real world in the mid 18th century by Sir Francis Dashwood, who inscribed it on a doorway of his abbey at Medmenham, where it served as the motto of The Hellfire Club.[8]

The same rule was used in 1904 by Aleister Crowley in The Book of the Law. This book contains both the phrase "Do what thou wilt" and the word Thelema in Greek, which Crowley took for the name of the philosophical, mystical and religious system which he subsequently developed. This system includes ideas from occultism, Yoga, and both Eastern and Western mysticism (especially the Qabalah).[14]

Shri Gurudev Mahendranath, in speaking of svecchachara, the Sanskrit equivalent of the phrase "Do what thou wilt", wrote that "Rabelais, Dashwood, and Crowley must share the honor of perpetuating what has been such a high ideal in most of Asia...

Wikipedia

Physiologus

2008-03-15T07:52:00.000-07:00

The Physiologus is a didactic text written or compiled in Greek by an unknown author, in Alexandria; its composition has been traditionally dated to the second century AD by readers who saw parallels with writings of Clement of Alexandria, who is asserted to have known the text, though Alan Scott has made a case for a date at the end of the third or in the fourth century. The Physiologus consists of descriptions of animals, birds, and fantastic creatures, sometimes stones and plants, provided with moral content. Each animal is described, and an anecdote follows, from which the moral and symbolic qualities of the animal are derived. Manuscripts are often, but not always, given illustrations, often lavish.

The book was translated into Latin in about 400, and into Ethiopic and Syriac, then into many European and Middle-Eastern languages, and many illuminated manuscript copies such as the Bern Physiologus survive. It retained its influence over ideas of the "meaning" of animals in Europe for over a thousand years. It was a predecessor of bestiaries (books of beasts). Medieval poetical literature is full of allusions that can be traced to the Physiologus tradition; the text also exerted great influence on the symbolism of medieval ecclesiastical art: symbols like those of the phoenix rising from its ashes and the pelican feeding her young with her own blood are still well-known...

Wikipedia entry

Monstrous Symbols

2008-03-15T07:11:00.000-07:00

All, all in Life’s but repetition,
Fancy sole is new in ev’ry stage.
What in past days nowhere came to vision,
That alone doth never age!

Johann Friedrich Christoph von Schiller

“What is the meaning of those absurd monstrosities, that astounding, amorphous plethora of form, that formal opulence of shapelessness standing in front of the eyes of studious monks in the cloisters? What are those obscene apes doing there? Those savage lions? Those centaurs and half-men? The striped tigers? And the fighting warriors? And the horn-blowing huntsmen? There we can see many bodies with one head and, conversely, many heads on a single body, here a quadruped with a serpent’s tail, over there a fish with a quadruped’s tail. Over there a beast, horse in front and goat behind, and again, a horned beast with a horse’s rump. Everywhere is such a rich and amazing profusion of different shapes, that one would sooner learn from the statues than contemplate the commandments of God…”

Saint Bernard, founder and abbot of the twelfth-century monastery of Clairvaux, was the iconoclast who thundered out this invective in an open letter to Abbot William of Cluny. Bernard was a leader of the strict, puristic reformed order set against the newly rich disciples of older reformers; he was a man of intense and personal mysticism, opposed to external show, crusading against waste of money on superfluous ostentation. Nevertheless, he was astute enough to allow instructive images of the benefit of lay people. Those monsters adorned the facades of Romanesque churches, crawled around the capitals of the pillars inside and gazed down from the timbered roofs. Three roads – antiquity, the Bible, and Physiologus – had converged and intertwined, bringing more than the unicorn into the European experience. In the West, with its not overly mature, not too deeply penetrated Christian tradition, where certainly many a pagan lay barely skindeep, they collided with relics of another world. This in fact produced a medley from which it was scarcely possible to unravel the original components, and in which concrete Christian tenets seemed in any case to be thoroughly lost. The uncivilized images appeared only to interfere with the desire of the flowering mysticism for direct communion of the soul with God. And yet those images became a gateway to such an encounter…

Unicorn Myth and Reality
Rudiger Robert Beer
Ash & Grant Ltd

Pivotal Points

2008-03-09T03:14:00.000-07:00

Priddy Nine Barrows

The Normal Visible Setting of Our Ordinary Lives

2008-03-09T03:07:00.000-07:00

Frys Hill - Cheddar

There being no official guardian of our country’s beauty, its guardianship is by default in commission amongst the few who care for it; and it is generally and rightly held that in such matters those who care the most are therefore those who know. That , at any rate, is all the claim that can be made for the authority of the Amenity Protectionists: they have no formal charter, no credentials of infallibility, and they have no legal or executive power or say whatever. They are small though passionate voices crying in the wilderness, and no one need heed them or pay the smallest attentions.

Nor, to be sure, do they – as yet. Being an almost (but not quite) negligible minority, they are prudently regarded as cranks – cranks too detached from the driving-shaft of the modern world to grip it effectively or to promote or retard its revolutions.

That, unfortunately, has some truth in it - or has had; but various organisations, of which the Council for the Protection of Rural England is typical, have recently been tightening things up, and it seems that power may yet be transmitted through these crank – combined and ordered so as to deliver a synchronised and quite appreciable thrust, not only on public opinion, but also upon Parliament, and so ultimately altering the very laws of the land.

The hose having been well and truly stolen, we are about to stage the great national ceremony of locking the stable door - not quite fruitlessly, as we are fallen so low that even the remaining straw and the halter have become precious to us as emblems of our former wealth.

Having already had the larger part of the South Downs filched from us, together with the margins of the New Forest and most of our accessible seaboard (to say nothing of the Home Counties and, at an earlier date, our commons throughout the land), our proposed door-locking comes none too soon.

But can we lock the door effectively even on what is left us – are the would-be janitors strong enough and numerous enough to prevail against the horse-thieves? That is a very urgent question, and one that only the event will answer.

Still, as has been said, all those who really concern themselves with beauty or care about amenity are agreed that England is being rapidly disfigured, and we may accept this as a fact. To many, indeed, it seems the most humiliating and tragic fact of the twentieth century. Cultivated people of all classes must deplore what is happening; are no doubt more or less indifferent; but there can surely be none so perverted as actually to welcome and applaud this mass violation. Pure and whole-hearted diabolists are as rare in aesthetics as in morals, but that there are those who will still or defy their consciences for the sake of personal gain – in any place and at any time – is incontestable. We are probably all ready to sin against the light to some extent (if we are well enough rewarded); and our consciences are as individual and personal as the palms of our hands.

A.’s quasi-religious zeal about the sacredness of natural beauty and our duty towards it in right building may seem queer and wrong-headed to his neighbour B. as B.’s perturbation over blasphemy or sexual unconventionality may seem to A. Yet B.’s sort have all the might, majesty and power of the law and the Churches on their side.

You may ravish and defile the most divine landscape in the world, and your children (being your children) will rise up and call you progressive. You are a “lucky prospector” or a “successful real-estate operator,/” a “live wire” and what local newspapers call “a prominent and respected citizen.” By your exploitation of the land you have enriched yourself and your heirs. You have done very well. God’s footstool! How convenient for the unscrupulous to sharpen their claws upon! How tattered is it becoming, how for ever gone and forgotten its first fresh comeliness!

If we technically blaspheme – mere perishable words – we are threatened with hell-fire and/or six month’s hard labour. For a hastily expressed thought we incur mot merely odium, but penalties definite and severe.

Yet for a deliberate act, brutally disregardful of natural beauty, essentially anti-social, sacrilegious and blasphemous, we receive the protection of the State, the accommodation of the banks, the approbation of our fellows, and the toleration of the Churches.

In the late War we were invited to fight to preserve England. We believe, we fought. It may be well to preserve England, but better to have an England worth preserving. We saved our country that we might ourselves destroy it.

Possibly that is the only road to pacifism - to destroy all that is fair and of good repute in our own country, all that fosters our pride and our love, so that we shall no longer care greatly what becomes of it, nor show any feeling save surprise should a foreign invader think it worth appropriating.

Certainly the dangerous adventure of war, even the probability of death or mutilation, offered a more attractive prospect to many of our countrymen than did their normal life back in England.

“The response of the Black Country and the industrial North has been magnificent - the patriotism of these simple, toil-worn men in leaving their homes and flocking to the colours is truly wonderful.” One recalls such paragraphs, and one recalls visions of Wigan, St Helens, Oldham and Sheffield.

True, the affections of man are strange and unreasoning, but the average home in such places is not calculated to inspire much love or loyalty or great self-sacrifice in its defence. That of course, is the danger of letting one’s country become too unpleasant – the dead point of indifference is passed and war (whether civil or other) is welcomed as at any rate a change from normal life.

The hundred per cent. Pacifist should perhaps aim at a country which, purged of all causes for pride, love or enthusiasm, is yet not so utterly bereft of all attractions as to exasperate.

That is the sober norm towards which we are now trending. We are modifying both towns and country, removing the worst reproaches from the one and much of its essential charm from the other.

We plant trees in the town and bungalows in the country, thus averaging England out into a dull uneventfulness whereby one place becomes much the same as any other – all incentive to exploration being thus removed at the same time as the great network of smoothed-out concrete roads is completed.

Truly it’s an ill bird that fouls its own nest, and not merely ill but perverted if it rejoices in the fouling.

The fat is that English people need mass psycho-analysis. We know the morbid symptoms - false standards and values, blindnesses and callousnesses and such-like. We need to discover the root causes of these disastrous abnormalities, and having discovered them, we many hope to prescribe for a cure. False values, and insensitiveness – particularly to beauty – these are probably at the root of the trouble.

Money itself has somehow usurped in our desires the place of the good things that it can purchase, or things good in themselves have crowded our of our limited imaginations the things which are better and best.

“I often wonder what the vintners buy
one half so precious as the things they sell.”

Insufferably hackneyed as a quotation, how often does this doubt affect our actual lives?

Because natural beauty is so prodigal, because so much of it is free, we are in danger of disregarding it, like the air we breathe. It is perilously easy to lose all consciousness of it, to become inured and dead to its stimuli, as are most English people. As a fact of any significance in their lives it ahs ceased to exist, and talk about it seems to them just tedious and unrealistic.

Because the balance-sheets ignore the more real values, and chartered accountants apprehend them not, we too disregard them or treat them as amiably fictitious; so ludicrously topsy-turvy is the current evaluation of the practical, normal Englishman!

Yet the apprehension and contemplation of beauty have yielded and can still yield the most ecstatic pleasure of which humanity is capable. So complete an ecstasy may be rare – sharp, stabbing pleasure even may only visit us occasionally; but a happy awareness of beauty about us should and could be the everyday condition of us all.

“The beauty about us” – that is, the beauty of country, town and village, the normal visible setting of our ordinary everyday lives – not that which is mewed up in galleries and museums or between the covers of books.

It is this common background of beauty that this book seeks to champion and defend.

England and the Octopus
Clough Williams-Ellis
First published 1928 reprint 1975
Watchmen and Thieves

The Roughest Sort of Truth

2008-03-09T03:00:00.001-07:00

Dungerness

For 25,000 years, more or less, Man or near-man has inhabited this world of ours. Only for the last few thousand years do we know very much about him. Only for the past century or so has he given cause for alarm and despondency in his maltreatment of the earth’s surface.

In all probability (so the authorities inform us) another 25,000,000 years or so will be lived through by humanity on this planet. If there is even the roughest sort of truth in these figures, the human race is after all very, very young, and may still be allowed a good deal of folly.

Certainly the thought of those millions of years ahead of us is somehow comforting – it does seem to give time in which to straighten out our muddles and mistakes, though it provides no good reason for our going on making them. Indeed, if wee could count fairly confidently on the world coming to an end quite soon , that would be the only excuse for letting things slide – trouble, even if they should serve to alleviate certain immediate distresses.

As, however, there seems to be no immediate prospect of fundamental changes in those wider spheres in which are expressed the philosophical and political genius of a people – changes that would go to he very seat of the disorders of the body politic – ameliorative measures are all that meanwhile seem possible in this as in to her departments of our national life. These measures are here suggested in no great hope of even a gradual cure being thereby assisted, but rather because, if the major operation that is really necessary cannot be performed, it is perhaps better to try ointments and lotions than to do nothing at all. They may give local and temporary relief, and are in any case a refuge against despair.

Some of our self-inflicted wounds and sore are in their very nature incurable and will leave indelible scars upon this physical world of ours that will outlast humanity itself. Others will remain as blemishes for generations, or perhaps for centuries; and if we can do even a little in the way of preventing that which is so abidingly disfiguring, so uncertain of cure, it would seem worth while, like the holding of a beleaguered city in the hope that something may survive to reward the rescuing host.

It is only a somewhat wilful faith in the ultimate sanity of the English people that can hearten one sufficiently to engage in so seemingly lost. The relieving force is not yet even enrolled, let along disciplined, and we have no proof that its steadiness or morale will be adequate to the enormous tasks that await it, to which each year, each day, we meanwhile add and add.

Everyone who reads this book – indeed, everyone who reads at all or has eyes in his head – knows that England has changed violently and enormously within the last few decades. Since the War, indeed, it has been changing with an acceleration that is catastrophic, thoroughly frightening the thoughtful amongst us, and making them sadly wonder whether anything recognisable of our lovely England will be left of our children’s children.

Little enough will be left for our own latter days: already we begin to tell each other guardedly and secretly of remote places where things are still as they used to be, where brutal exploitation is not yet, and where there is no new building, or where such buildings as there may be are well-mannered and harmonious.

For- need it be said? – it is chiefly the pate of mean building all over the country that is shrivelling up the old England – mean and perky little souls should inhabit with satisfaction.

Yet for the sake of our countrymen and our good opinion of them we must hope and believe that the unfortunates who dwell therein are thoroughly miserable, furtive and ashamed, and by no means the creatures that would seem the only appropriate tenants of what the twentieth century has offered them as homes.

But what vindictive monsters must their builders be – what grudge they must have against their England and against generations of Englishmen yet unborn!

All of which, of course, is no more than oratorical nonsense.

We know well enough that decent, God-fearing, God-damning Englishmen live very contentedly in the pink asbestos bungalow; and if they chance to be on Salisbury Plain or Dartmoor or the South Downs, or some commanding hill in the Cotswolds or the Chilterns where they can be seen from miles around, they are the more content and very far from ashamed.

And the builders, even the speculative builders – they are charming. Most of them take a pride in their work, many of them are honest; and to be a builder or contractor at all bespeaks considerable enterprise and organising ability – qualities very valuable in the citizen.

And yet…
Here we have two parties, each estimable and perhaps without reproach in everything else, conspiring together to commit an outrage upon the mother that bore them.

We have become tender in these days; yet because these people are blind, and ignorant of what they do, are we to hold them guiltless? And who shall decide what is and what is not an outrage?

England and the Octopus
Clough Williams-Ellis
First published 1928 reprint 1975
Chapter 1, The Prodigal Planet - page 11

Visual Beauty

2008-03-09T01:54:00.000-08:00

There is nothing weighty or authoritative about the gadfly, yet for all that its sting has sometimes so tickled or exasperated the noblest of the brutes that his plunging reactions have changed the very course of history.

The generously endowed English seem to have been given a special immunity against visual beauty that only the most violent attacks can break through, and it is in the hope of piecing the thick and often calloused skins of my countrymen, and injecting a little doubt and discomfort, that I have deliberately envenomed my small dart.

Individuals as well as classes can well defend themselves, and I am less concerned about being wholly just to them than in shocking tem into some realisation of what their defenceless England is becoming through the acts and omissions of its prodigal people as a whole.

The biological use and justification of pain is to give warning of damage or ill-heath, and the following pages are designed to provoke a sensibility that must mean discomfort for the reader rather than pleasure. A state of things that some of us already find intolerable can only be changed by enlisting, through pain, a great body of active sympathisers who have come to see that to go as you please is not always to arrive at what is pleasant.

C.W.E
Portmerion
March 1928

England and the Octopus
Clough Williams-Ellis
First published 1928 reprint 1975
page 9

The Mozambique Floods 2000

2008-03-05T06:38:00.000-08:00

In early 2000 a cyclone swept across southern Africa leading to three weeks of severe floods which devastated Mozambique.

There is a desperate irony in the flooded plain.
As far as the eye can see the mass of glittering water tells the tale,
Adrift in tree-topped nests clinging souls stretch out,
and From the air the leafy perches dangle their Human fruits
And the plane Drones over.

So It seems, a whole TV nation is Entranced, spellbound by this Strange arboreal Display.
Globally glimpsed and earnestly Engaged by this we witness abscission.
One by one, almost Nonchalantly, the bright fruits drop Silently from the trees;
Heaven receives its harvest of souls and the earth Surrenders its children.

Vicky 2000

Out of their hollow boar

2008-03-05T05:27:00.001-08:00

… They prayed to this unknown Ultimate, out of their hollow boar, above that gleaming current, so simultaneously and so intensely, that the magnetism of their prayer shot like a meteorite out of the earth’s planetary atmosphere. Something about its double origin, and something about the swift and translucent water from which it started on its flight, drove it forward beyond the whole astronomical world, and beyond the darkness enclosing that world, till it reached the primal Cause of all life.

What happens when such a wild-goose, heart-furious arrow of human wanting touches that portion of the First Cause’s awareness that encircles the atmosphere circumference of the earth? So many other organisms throughout the stellar constellations and throughout the higher dimensions are unceasingly crying out to this Primordial Power, that it can obviously only offer to the supplications of our planet a limited portion of its magnetic receptivity. And again, as all earth dwellers discover only too quickly, it Itself is divided against Itself in those ultimate regions of primal causation. Its primordial goodness warring forever against its primordial evil holds life up only by vast excess of energy and by oceans of lavish waste. Even though the cry of a particular creature may reach the First Cause, there is always a danger of its being intercepted by the evil will of this vast Janus-faced Force. Down through the abysses of ether, away from the central nucleus of this dualistic Being, descend through the darkness that is beyond the world two parallel streams of magnetic force, one good and one evil; and it is these undulating streams of vibration, resembling infinite spider webs blown about upon an eternal wind, that bring luck or ill luck to the creature praying. The best time for any human being to pray to the First Cause if he wants his prayers to have a prosperous issue is one or other of the two Twilights; either the twilight preceding the dawn or the twilight following the sunset. Human prayers that are offered up at noon are often intercepted by the Sun – for all creative powers are jealous of one a other – and those that are offered up at midnight are liable to be waylaid by the Moon in her seasons or by the spirit of some thwarting planet. It is a natural fact that these Two Twilights are propitious to psychic intercourse with the First Cause while other hours are malignant and baleful. It is also a natural fact, known to very few, that many of the prayers offered to the First Cause by living organisms in their desperation are answered by less powerful but much more pitiful divinities. Priests of our race, wise in the art of prayer, are wont to advise us to pray to these lesser powers rather than to the First Cause; and they are wise in this advice. For whereas the evil in the First Cause is only partially overcome by the good, in some of these “little gods” there is hardly any evil at all. They are all com pact of magical pity and vibrant tenderness…

JC Powys
A Glastonbury Romance
Page 77

John Crow’s Stonehenge

2008-03-01T06:17:00.001-08:00

… He had turned as soon as they were a few paces away from the stones and was now gazing at them with an ecstasy that was like a religious trance. It was an ecstasy that totally abolished Time… the enormous body of colossal stones wavered, hovered, swayed and rocked before him; so wrought upon was he, so caught up was he. It rocked like the prow of a vast ship before him before him. He and It were alone in space. Its dark menacing bulk seemed to grow calmer and larger. The taciturn enormity of the uplifted horizontal stones seemed to impose themselves upon his mind with an implication more stupendous than the supporting perpendicular ones. These uplifted stones – these upheld nakednesses - that covered nothing less than the breast of the earth and upon which nothing less than the universal sky rested, seemed to have become, by their very uplifting, more formidable and more sacred than the ones that held them up. They were like cyclopean Sabine women upheld by gigantic ravishers. Both those that upheld and those that were upheld loomed portentous in their passivity, but the passivity of the latter, while more pronounced, was much more imposing. What the instinctive John Crow recognized in this great Body of Stones – both in those bearing-up and in those borne-up - was that they themselves, just as they were, had become, by the mute creative action of four thousand years, authentic Divine Beings. They were so old and great, these Stones, that they assumed godhead by their inherent natural right, gathered godhead up, as a lightning conductor gathers up electricity, and to any priest! And what enhanced the primeval grandeur of what John Crow gazed at was the condition of the elements at that hour. Had there been no remnants of twilight left, the darkness and Stonehenge would have completely interpenetrated. Had the stars been bright, their eternal remoteness would have derogated from the mystic enormity of this terrestrial portent. The stars were, however, so blurred and so indistinct, and, atmospherically speaking, so far away, that Stonehenge had no rival…

Never would Stonehenge look more majestic, more mysterious, than it looked tonight! The wind had almost dropped and yet there was enough left to stir the dead stems of last year’s grasses and to make a faint, very faint susurration as it moved among the Stones. The very indistinctiveness of the dying daylight served also to enhance the impressiveness of the place. Had the night been pitch dark nothing would have been distinguished. On the other hand, had the twilight not advanced so far, the expanding sweep of the surrounding downs would have carried the eye away from the stones themselves and reduced their shadowy immensity. No artificial arrangement of matter, however terrific and un-hewn, can compare with the actual hollows and excrescences of the planet itself; but the primeval erection at which John Crow stared now, like the ghost of a Neolithic slave at the gods of his masters, was increased in weight and mass by reason of the fact that nothing surrounded it except a vague, neutral, Cimmerian greyness…

A Glastonbury Romance - John Cowper Powys
Page 103

Typed on March 1st, 2008 whilst listening to The Laminations of Jeremiah by Robert White (1538-1574)

Plumping up the pillows on the Vernal tide

2008-02-03T04:08:00.000-08:00

tum ti tim ti tum....

Up! up! my Friend, and quit your books;
Or surely you'll grow double:
Up! up! my Friend, and clear your looks;
Why all this toil and trouble?

The sun above the mountain's head,
A freshening lustre mellow
Through all the long green fields has spread,
His first sweet evening yellow.

Books! 'tis a dull and endless strife:
Come, hear the woodland linnet,
How sweet his music! on my life,
There's more of wisdom in it.

And hark! how blithe the throstle sings!
He, too, is no mean preacher:
Come forth into the light of things,
Let Nature be your teacher.

She has a world of ready wealth,
Our minds and hearts to bless--
Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health,
Truth breathed by cheerfulness.

One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:--
We murder to dissect.

Enough of Science and of Art;
Close up those barren leaves;
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.

-- William Wordsworth

Invocation of Venus

2008-02-03T03:16:00.000-08:00

Priestess: rings bell 3-5-3 “Procul O’ procul esti profani!” rings bell “Balesti! Ompida!”

Priest banishes LBRP & BRH . Priest: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.” Priestess: “Love is the law, love under will.” Priestess & Priest face each other.
Priestess: “Unity uttermost showed! I adore the might of thy breath, supreme and terrible God, Who makest the gods and death To tremble before Thee:- I, I adore thee! Appear on the throne of Ra! Open the ways of the khu! Lighten the ways of the ka! The ways of the Khabs run through To stir me or still me! Aum! let it fill me!” Priestess assumes God-Form of Osiris Risen. Priest: “The light is mine; its rays consume Me: I have made an secret door Into the House of Ra and Tum, Of Khephra and of Ahathoor. I am thy Theban, O Mentu, The prophet Ankh-af-na-khonsu! By Bes-na-Maut my breast I beat; By wise Ta-Nech I weave my spell.
Show thy star-splendour, O Nuit! Bid me within thine House to dwell, O winged snake of light, Hadit! Abide with me, Ra-Hoor-Khuit!”

Priest assumes God-Form of Osiris Risen.

Priest, east, in the Sign of Shu: “Hail unto Thee who art Ra in Thy rising, even unto Thee
who art Ra in Thy strength, who travellest over the Heavens in Thy bark at the Uprising of the Sun. Tahuti standeth in His splendour at the prow, and Ra-Hoor abideth at the helm. Hail unto Thee from the Abodes of Night!”

Priest, south, in the Sign of Thoum-aesh-neith: “Hail unto Thee who art Ahathoor in Thy
triumphing, even unto Thee who art Ahathoor in Thy beauty, who travellest over the
heavens in Thy bark at the Mid-course of the Sun. Tahuti standeth in his splendour at the
prow, and Ra-Hoor abideth at the helm. Hail unto Thee from the Abodes of Morning!”

Priestess, west, in the Sign of Auramoth: “Hail unto Thee who art Tum in Thy setting, even unto
Thee who art Tum in Thy joy, who travellest over the heavens in Thy bark at the Down-going of the Sun. Tahuti standeth in his splendour at the prow, and Ra-Hoor abideth at the helm. Hail unto Thee from the Abodes of Day!

Priestess, north, in the Sign of Set Fighting: “Hail unto Thee who art Khephra in Thy hiding, even unto Thee who art Khephra in Thy silence, who travellest over the heavens in Thy bark at the Midnight Hour of the Sun. Tahuti standeth in His splendour at the prow, and Ra-Hoor abideth at the helm. Hail unto Thee from the Abodes of Evening.

Priest: “Hail unto Thee, O’ Maat, Goddess of Truth and Justice!
Try thou this Seer in Thy Scales that thy feather be not stirred by her breath!
Aye! If her invocation be not just to a hair; if her knowledge be imperfect-
Now I see Thee, O’ glorious plumes One; now I see Thee make the sign- and now-”

Priestess performs Invoking Hexagram Ritual of Venus

Priest: “I adore Thee by the Twelve Gratifications and by the Unity thereof.”

Slight Pause.

Priest: “O Thou green-cloaked Maenad in labour, who bearest beneath Thy leaden girdle
the vintage of Thy kisses; release me from the darkness of Thy womb, so that I may cast
off my infant wrappings and leap forth as an armed warrior in steel.”

Priestess: “O Thou snake of misty countenance, whose braided hair is like a fleecy dawn
of swooning maidens; hunt me as a fierce wild boar through the skies, so that Thy burning spear
may gore the blue heavens red with the foaming blood of my frenzy.”

Priest: “O Thou cloudy Virgin of the World, whose breasts are as scarlet lilies paling
before the sun; dandle me in the cradle of Thine arms, so that the murmur of Thy voice
may lull me to a sleep like a pearl lost in the depths of a silent sea.”

Priestess: “O Thou wine-voiced laughter of fainting gloom, who art as a naked faun
crushed to death between millstones of thunder; make me drunk on the rapture of Thy
song, so that in the corpse-clutch of my passion I may tear the cloud-robe from off Thy
swooning breast.”

Priest: “O Thou wanton cup-bearer of madness, whose mouth is as the joy of a thousand
thousand masterful kisses; intoxicate me on Thy loveliness, so that the silver of Thy
merriment may revel as a moon-white pearl upon my tongue.”

Priestess: “ O Thou midnight Vision of Whiteness, whose lips are as pouting rosebuds
deflowered by the deciduous moon; tend me as a drop of dew in Thy breast, so that the
dragon of Thy gluttonous hate may devour me with its mouth of adamant.”

Priest: “O Thou effulgence of burning love, who pursueth the dawn as a youth pursueth a
rose-lipped maiden; rend me with the fierce kisses of Thy mouth, so that in the battle of
our lips I may be drenched by the snow pure fountains of Thy bliss.”

Priestess: “O Thou black bull in a field of white girls, whose foaming flanks are as starry
night ravished in the fierce arms of noon; shake forth the purple horns of my passion, so
that I may dissolve as a crown of fire in the bewilderment of Thine ecstasy.”

Priest: “O Thou dread arbiter of all men, the hem of whose broidered skirt crimsoneth the
white battlements of Space; bare me the starry nipple of Thy breast, so that the milk of Thy love may
nurture me to the lustiness of Thy virginity.”

Priestess: “O Thou thirsty charioteer of Time, whose cup is the hollow night filled with the foam of the vintage of day; drench me in the shower of Thy passion, so that I may pant in Thine arms as a tongue of lightning on the purple bosom of night.”

Priest: “O Thou opalescent Serpent-Queen, whose mouth is as the sunset that is bloody
with the slaughter of day; hold me in the crimson flames of Thine arms, so that at Thy
kisses I may expire as a bubble in the foam of Thy dazzling lips.

Priestess: “O Thou Odalisque of earth's palace, whose garments are scented and
passionate as spring flowers in sunlit glades; roll me in the sweet perfume of Thy hair, so
that Thy tresses of gold may anoint me with the honey of a million roses.”

Priest: “O Thou manly warrior amongst youths, whose limbs are as swords of fire that are
welded in the furnace of war; press Thy cool kisses to my burning lips, so that the folly of
our passion may weave us into the Crown of everlasting Light.”

Priest & Priestess together: “O Glory be unto Thee through all Time and through all Space: Glory, and Glory upon Glory, Everlastingly. Amen, and Amen, and Amen.

Priest: “Mother of Light, and the Gods! Mother of Music awake! Silence and Speech are at odds; Heaven and Hell are at stake. By the Rose and the Cross I conjure; I constrain by the Snake and the Sword; I am he that is sworn to endure --- Bring us the word of the Lord! By the brood of the Bysses of Brightening, whose God was my sire; By the Lord of the Flame and the Lightning, the King of the Spirits of Fire; By the Lord of the Waves and the Waters, the King of the Hosts of the Sea, The fairest of all of whose daughters was mother to me;

By the Lord of the Winds and the Breezes, the King of the Spirits of Air,
In whose bosom the infinite ease is that cradled me there; By the Lord of the Fields and the Mountains, the King of the Spirits of Earth That nurtured my life at his fountains from the hour of my birth;

By the Wand and the Cup I conjure; by the Dagger and Disk I constrain;
I am he that is sworn to endure; make thy music again! I am Lord of the Star and the Seal; I am Lord of the Snake and the Sword; Reveal us the riddle, reveal! Bring us the word of the Lord;

As the flame of the sun, as the roar of the sea, as the storm of the air,
As the quake of the earth --- let it soar for a boon, for a bane, for a snare,
For a lure, for a light, for a kiss, for a rod, for a scourge, for a sword ---
Bring us thy burden of bliss --- Bring us the word of the Lord!”

Priestess: “Daughter of Glory, child Of Earth's Dione mild By the Father of all, the Aegis-bearing King! Spouse, daughter, mother of God, Queen of the blest abode In Cyprus' splendour singly glittering Sweet sister unto me, cry aloud to thee! I laugh upon thee laughing, O dew caught up from the sea!

Draw by sharp sparrow and dove and swan's wide plumes of love, And all the swallow’s swifter vehemence, And, subtler than the Sphinx, That ineffable lynx heralds thy splendour swooning into sense, When from the bluest bowers And greenest-hearted hours Of Heaven thou smilest toward earth, a miracle of flowers!

Down to the loveless sea Where lay Persephone Violate, where the shade of earth is black,
Crystalline out of space Flames the immortal face! The glory of the comet-tailèd track
Blinds all black earth with tears Silence awakes and hears The music of thy moving come over the starry spheres.

Wrapped in rose, green and gold, Blues many and manifold, A cloud of incense hides thy splendour of light; Hides from the prayer's distress The loftier loveliness Till thy veil's glory shrouds the earth from the night; And silence speaks indeed, Seeing the subtler speed
Of its own thought than speech of the Pandean reed!

There no voice may be heard! No place for any word! The heart's whole fervour silently speeds to thee, Immaculate! and craves, Thy kisses or the grave's, Till, knowing its unworthiness to woo thee, Remembers, grows content With the old element, and asks the lowlier grace its earlier music meant.”

Pause, silence.

Priestess knocks 2-3-2

Priestess: “Hathoor am I, and to my beauty drawn all glories of the Universe bow down,
The blossom and the mountain and the dawn, Fruit's blush, and woman, our creations's crown.
I am the priest, the sacrifice, the shrine, I am the love and life of the divine!
Life, death, love, hatred, light, darkness are surely mine --- Are mine!

Venus am I, the love and light of earth, The wealth of kisses, the delight of tears, The barren pleasure never come to birth, The endless, infinite desire of years. I am the shrine at which thy long desire Devoured thee with intolerable fire. I was song, music, passion, death, upon thy lyre ---
Thy lyre!

I am the Grail and I the Glory now: I am the flame and fuel of thy breast; I am the star of God upon thy brow; I am thy queen, enraptured and possessed. Hide thee, sweet river; welcome to the sea, Ocean of love that shall encompass thee! Life, death, love, hatred, light, darkness, return to me --- To me!”

Priestess speaks extemporaneously, answering questions and dilivering wisdom, as moved by the spirit of Venus; when finished she says:

“For I am divided for love’s sake, for the chance of union ... There is no bond that can
unite the divided but love: all else is a curse.”

Priestess gives kiss to all present, laying on hands to inbue the Venus Force.

Priest (widdershins, in sign of Osiris Risen): “This Rite is at an end. We do thank all
creatures called forth by this Ritual. Return now in peace to thine abodes and habitations.
Let there ever be peace between We and Thee, and be ye ever ready to come when ye
are called.”

Return to Center.

Priest shuts down altar, knocks.

Priestess: “In the name of NUIT, and HADIT, and RA-HOOR-KHUIT, We now declare
this temple duly closed.” knocks 3-5-3

http://www.solarphallic-cult.org/invocvenus.htm

A Horticultural Fantasy

2008-01-21T14:10:00.000-08:00

Will you be my priest, and build a fane in some untrodden region of my mind? There where branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain, shall murmur in the wind. Far, far around shall those dark-cluster’d thoughts fledge the wild-ridged mountains steep by steep. And there by zephyrs, streams, and birds and bees, and by the moss-lain Dryads I shall be lull’d to sleep; and in the midst of this wide quietness will you dress my mind with the wreath’d trellis of wonders from a working brain, will you weave around with the buds,and bells and stars of mystery all without a name, using all that the gardener Fancy e’er could feign, who breeding flowers, will never breed the same. And there shall be for thee all soft delight that shadowy thought can win, a mirror to reflect the light from your bright torch, a window ope to let the warm love in!

With thanks to John Keats 1795 - 1812

Footprints at Dawn

2008-01-21T12:56:00.000-08:00

Footprints at dawn
A green beach miles from the ocean
On a warm weekend – a familiar sight
With stars and planets
Lost in the bliss of fluid motion

VH 2005

Enjoying Life in Spite of Everything

2008-01-21T12:51:00.000-08:00

… What we must revive, in these mechanical days, is the soul’s power of detaching itself from everything, and enjoying life in spite of everything. Circumstances we can seldom change. Money-worries, love-worries, ambition-worries, health-worries, employment-worries we all have to endure. They are there; and we – we are there! To suffer physical suffering, to lose our days in meaningless drudgery, to have decisions to make, people to cajole, people to threaten, people to cheat ad to be cheated by, fruitless hateful encounters with people who are more alien to us than archangels or water-flies – these things are simply life. Only an infinitesimal number of creatures ever, by the divine favour of the gods, escape these things. To suffer something other, to have to face something or other, this is simply to live. This is what life is…

In Defense of Sensuality

John Cowper Powys
Victor Gollancz Ltd 1930
Page 220

To Be Alive

2008-01-21T12:48:00.000-08:00

…Can anyone deny that there is an organic link, potent, magnetic, psychic-chemical, binding together all existence, “animate” as well as what they falsely call “inanimate”? It is by means of this organic link that I can speak of the psychic-sensuous feelings of plant and reptiles and birds and fishes and beasts, and for all that long series of sub-human lives which emerges from earth and water to breathe the invisible air. It is by means of this organic stream of innumerable lives, now stretching out their irresistible antennae in premonitory awareness of a dimension of Being beyond man, that I can speak for the sensual feelings in our nature that touch the super-human.

…The lonely soul must face the full basic implication of being alive. To be alive means to be as “good” as you can, and as little cruel as you can, in a System organised upon a mad substratum of monstrous duality… From the mud we spring. And the “soul” of the “body” of mud must be immortal, if there be any immortality anywhere. The “soul” of the “body” of that mud is as important as anything else. Good is it and evil is it, even as the soul of its creator.

…The reason why so many human beings give themselves up today to the modern malady of “futility,” is that the false, artificial, human idealism that has fed them with lies has been found out, and they are left with nothing else. Let them fall back on the lovely delights of a simple sacramental sensuousness. These delights never pall or fail; and, if we are not unemployed or mad or in the hands of the police, they never can fail. What, in fact, produces the futility-malady” among us is a refusal to concentrate upon the simple psychic-sensuous delights that everybody can enjoy, and the refusal to make of these little things a ladder to the ultimate.

… The happier the lonely soul grows to be, the more freely does it fling away itself and its possessions for the benefit of all who pass by. When the well-to-do person ceases to experience a craving to feed the hungry and to create some sort of pleasure in the nerves of the miserable, one may draw, as an absolutely certain conclusion, that his own inner life is sterile, abortive, pulverised. It is , as everyone knows, a psychic peculiarity of certain perfect spring days, that plants, birds, reptiles, animals, and even insects, seem to pour forth upon the air a surplusage of vibrant well-being, as though every tiniest organism there, every infinitesimalest cell inside every organism, were consciously lavishing its own psychic magnetism as a free gift to all the rest.

…The old immemorial “goodness” that Rousseau and Goethe believed in, natural to all entities, animate or inanimate – the ancient “goodness” that prevents even the most predatory of creatures from practicing cruelty for cruelty’s sake – is enough to save us from the adder’s-tooth of remorse. We need feel no remorse when we give up every “conviction” we possess, every “principle” we possess, every vestige of every “creed.” So long as you refrain from cruelty and from all cruel thought, you are completely and absolutely fulfilling the deepest purpose of life by being simply happy. The only real sin is not to be happy; and except for your oven extreme pain, or the extreme pain of anyone you love, it is in your own power whether to be happy or not. The Universe owes you no happiness. Life owes you no happiness.

…One of the silliest and meanest of human attitudes to life – an attitude taken only by beings of an extraordinary opacity of perception – it is the attitude which assumes that there is “One Great Law” running through everything, an implacable moral Law, full of Rationality and Righteousness, and that it is the wilful deviations from this Law, among the various living creatures, that cause the unhappiness in the world. There is no such Law! Down in the heart of every minutest nucleus of electric and psychic life, there is irrationality, arbitrariness, free choice, and an element of the undetermined. The mechanistic philosophers and logic-mongering pseudo-scientists who talk of “fate” and “determinism” must be singularly devoid of any kind of honest introspection.

What do all living things feel and see when they turn their minds inward? They feel and see two facts: first that not Fate but Chance is the dominant power in the world; second, that the secret of all movement, of all change, is a mingling of the creative energy of the First Cause with their own creative energy. Both of these two energies are unfathomably arbitrary, wilful, and irrational. When these dull-witted rationalists tell u, as they are always doing today, that no magical, no mythological view of the universe is any longer possible, let them be answered by a very brief retort. There is no view of the universe, there has never been any view of the universe, brought into real contact with the ways of Nature, that is not saturated through and through with magic and mythology! So far from magic being absent from the processes of life, there is nothing in these processes that is not magic.

…So many of us are compelled to live in hideously modern towns and cities; and the very prick and quick of our harassed lives depends upon the way we take our destiny. The great secret is to assume an attitude of ironical detachment from the whole spectacle of modern life. Not to take such life “for granted” – that is the trick. The mind can easily work this miracle. The mind within us is not merely the mind of a foolishly-sophisticated city-dweller, fussing about amidst shops, offices, studios, theatres, concert halls. It is the mind of a starfish, a bird, a polar bear, a viper, a sea-anemone, a sycamore-tree, a half-born planetary god! The best way to live in such places is to concentrate on all the sacramental symbols of “real reality” that we can disentangle from this machinery and from these prodding iron spikes. These house, these pavements, these noisy street can be treated as if they were so much primeval mud and sand and scoriac rock, across which we draw (ourselves), enjoying the aboriginal “feel of matter” - the feel of warm sunshine, of the cool wind, of the tossing rain.

When we first wake up, the best thing to do is to gather together those particular impressions of cumulated memories of our sense-life that have thrilled us most, and with the whole dreamy weight of our nature to taste them once again in a sort of stoical desperation. That is where memory is so wonderful a goddess; for nothing can take our memories from us. With the power of memory at our disposal, we can enjoy life to the bitter end. We must have the wit to copy the cattle. We must chew the cud of delicious memory and defy Providence to take it from us.

Round and about, over and beneath these precious sense-memories, hover the undertones and overtones whose heavenly essences are the purpose of our existence. It is to accumulate these that we live – not to acquire fame or wealth or honour. Any monotonous labour is a valuable aid to this secret ecstasy, to this furtive, hidden worship of the life-stream. But the advantage is lost if such work exacts too close an attention! It is sheer madness to waste our brief life in vulgar gregarious excitement, when a rapture so much more intense is awaiting every solitary moment of mental liberty. The insect-like human beings who hurry to join every buzzing swarm they can find, resemble sticky , silly flies going up and down a hot, shut window, while all the while, a yard or so away, is the wide-open door.

…the philosophy of the Missing Lind – does not need any unusual “orgies” in order to get its deep, profane thrill. It needs nothing but the taste of bread, of butter, of honey, of milk, of tea, of coffee, of wine. It needs nothing but the look of a lighted fire or a lighted candle. It needs nothing but the touch of its mate, of its offspring, of a patch of earth-mould, of a gust of wet, westerly wind, of a streak of sunlight between the wretchedest curtains.

…Figuratively speaking, we ought to take off our shoes in the presence of every living organism we encounter. The saint’s power of “loving” every organism he meets may indeed excite our astonishment; but it is well within our “animal-vegetable” scope to bend with scrupulous fetish-worship before the presence of a dead tree, a cut worm, a withered plant, a mangy cat, a faded doll, a broken idol, a murderer, any poor scrofulous devil, any God-forsaken whore!

Oh, the moment has come when we must break the prison-bars of our narrow human state and enter the life-religion of those great time-aeons and space-immensities that include all the cosmic children of Chance and the First Cause!

Higher and higher, every new day of our secret life, mounts up the intoxicating wave of sense-memories. Lilac-bushes in back-yards, smoke-blackened trees by murky pools, village-commons with broken railings where the small grey rain seems to fall for ever from the north-west, wet ditches full of yellow flowers by the wayside, faded stucco-houses with rusty ironwork on their roofs and red geraniums in their window-boxes, clearings in swampy moss-grown withy-beds, newly ploughed fields forged by querulous crows, gleaming sands with thin black windrows of sea-scum over which the foam-bubbles drift rainbow-tinted from the breaking surf, noon-drowsy road-banks where little blue butterflies hover above the hot dusty dandelions, lonely tollpike houses on wind-swept hills where groups of stunted Scotch-firs creak and murmur like exhausted sentries in armour – such are a few of the impressions that rise up upon us and flow through us when we sink into that inner world of real reality, which daily, monthly, yearly grows richer and richer – that sub-human, super-human world which the deep essence of Life itself gives to its children. Such things as I have named are drawn from country memories; but even city life has its own intermittent magic for such as have eyes and ears.

… Society is the most insidious fungus growth, into which all the most corrupt poisons of the human peril distil their plague-pus… This book is written to reveal the fact that it is possible, by invading the social humanity in us from both ends at once, to squeeze it out almost completely! The sub-human invades this human element from below, thrilling us with the lovely receptivity of the vegetable world, while the super-human invades it from above, thrilling us with strange intimations of a god-like state as yet unrealised.

Is it not a mysterious thing how some deep taboo in our inmost nature makes us dodge the issue and feel as if we dare not follow our natural instincts? What these natural instincts encourage us to do is to turn the whole orientation of personal life inside out, and make of what hitherto has been regarded as unimportant and unessential the only important and the only essential thing. In fact, we must make of what hitherto has been casually taken for granted as mere accidental feelings coming to us en route the whole essence of the grand matter of our days. We must take the fluctuating, undulating margin of our simplest sensuous impressions- that margin which has so many mysterious avenues and vistas, and which hitherto has floated round us unconsidered, disregarded, neglected – and our of it, as we hoard and store up its visions like miser’s farthings, we must consciously weave the inmost cocoon of our spiritual identity.

Oh, we must break loose from our human prison and thrust the tendrils and antennae of our being into both the non-human worlds. When we have done so, when we have squeezed our human sensibility into a very small space – squeezed it between our sub-human nature and our supper-human nature - why, then it will be seen what free, happy, profane spaciousness there is for our soul! There is, indeed, an incredible feeling of liberation when one realises one’s lonely identity in the midst of rocks and stones and trees and the great silent motions of the constellations; not to speak of planetary spirits and all the invisible organisms that fill the gulfs of space! How can anyone, thinking of the difference between emotions of this sort and the gregarious mob-emotions of any Megalopolis, but realise that the moment has come for the birth of what Spengler would call a New Culture?

In Defense of Sensuality

John Cowper Powys
Victor Gollancz Ltd 1930
Page 248

Amazing Secrecy in Which the Mind Unfolds

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...I often watch children in the early teens and wonder if the world to them is as exquisite as it was to me, and if, in the amazing secrecy in which the mind unfolds itself, they can claim as many lovely dreams as those which once belonged to me.

A faint echo of this old magic meets me now and then round the bend of a road, the scent of fennel always awakens it, or the sight of a bee in a snapdragon or a nest full of young birds with their bare necks stretched out, the grey down on their heads. Just as some notes can be pitched high enough to break a glass, so these associations vibrating in the mind shatter cynicism and re-create for a fraction of a second a shining, sensuous world, a million times more lovely than the world has ever been, but, in less time than a shadow flies across the grass, the second passes and a man is left where he was before with realities around him.

In Scotland Again
HV Morton

Warren Cottage

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Tucked in a cluster of trees,
The cottage hides from the walking lane,
Flint-bricked on a wheatened hill,
Crowned by an English rood.

Looking north,
An ancient fort moated by knurled oak,
Where once centurions stood, clenched against the wind,
Plumed in the shade to greet the dawn with fear.

On the south,
Nymphs and a scaled garden,
Foliation's and stems and tarragon and tyme,
Its own Byzantium,
Hedged in the patient simplicity of sun.

Within the cottage,
Musick and an oil-lit fantasy of suites,
Plucked wingless among the old bricks,
A tracery of eaves, and shuttered windows,

All veiled in a brush of trees,
Where the fire and the rose are one.

Keith Treacher

Converging Streams of Human Life

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……“There is a place in front of the Royal Exchange where the wide pavement reaches out like a promontory. It is in the shape of a triangle with a rounded apex. A stream of traffic runs on either side, and other streets send their currents down into the open space before it. Like the spokes of a wheel converging streams of human life flow into this agitated pool. Horses and carriages, carts, vans, omnibuses, cabs, every kind of conveyance cross each other’s course in every possible direction. Twisting in and out by the wheels and under the horses’ heads, working a devious way, men and women of all conditions wind a path over. They fill the interstices between the carriages and blacken the surface, till the vans almost float on human beings. Now the streams slacken, and now they rush again, but never cease; dark waves are always rolling down the incline opposite, waves swell out from the side rivers, all London converges into this focus. There is an indistinguishable noise - it is clatter, hum, or roar, it is not resolvable; made up of a thousand footsteps, from a thousand hoofs, a thousand wheels - of haste, and shuffle, and quick movements, and ponderous loads; no attention can resolve it into a fixed sound.

Blue carts and yellow omnibuses, varnished carriages and brown vans, green omnibuses and red cabs, pale loads of yellow straw, rusty-red iron clanking on paintless carts, high white wool-packs, grey horses, bay horses, black teams; sunlight sparkling on brass harness, gleaming from carriage panels; jingle, jingle, jingle! An intermixed and intertangled, ceaselessly changing jingle, too, of colour; flecks of colour champed, as it were, like bits in the horses’ teeth, frothed and strewn about, and a surface always of dark-dressed people winding like the curves on fast-flowing water. This is the vortex and whirlpool, the centre of human life to-day on the earth. Now the tide rises and now it sinks, but the flow of these rivers always continues. Here it seethes and whirls, not for an hour only, but for all present time, hour by hour, day by day, year by year.

Here it rushes and pushes, the atoms triturate and grind, and eagerly thrusting by, pursue their separate ends. Here it appears in its unconcealed personality, indifferent to all else but itself, absorbed and rapt in eager self, devoid and stripped of conventional gloss and politeness, yielding only to get its own way; driving, pushing, carried on in a stress of feverish force like a bullet, dynamic force apart from reason or will, like the force that lifts the tides and sends the clouds onward. The friction of a thousand interests evolves a condition of electricity in which men are moved to and fro without considering their steps. Yet the agitated pool of life is stonily indifferent, the thought is absent or preoccupied, for it is evident that the mass are unconscious of the scene in which they act.

But it is more sternly real than the very stones, for all these men and women that pass through are driven on by the push of accumulated circumstances; they cannot stay, they must go, their necks are in the slave’s ring, they are beaten like seaweed against the solid walls of fact. In ancient times, Xerxes, the king of kings, looking down upon his myriads, wept to think that in a hundred years not one of them would be left. Where will be these millions of to-day in a hundred years? But, further than that, let us ask, where then will be the sum and outcome of their labour? If they wither away like summer grass, will not at least a result be left which those of a hundred years hence may be the better for? No, not one jot! There will not be any sum or outcome or result of this ceaseless labour and movement; it vanishes in the moment that it is done, and in a hundred years nothing will be there, for nothing is there now. There will be no more sum or result that accumulates from the motion of a revolving cowl on a housetop. Nor do they receive any more sunshine during their lives, for they are unconscious of the sun.

I used to come and stand near the apex of the promontory of pavement which just out towards the pool of life; I still go there to ponder. Burning in the sky, the sun shone on me as when I rested in the narrow valley carved in prehistoric time. Burning in the sky, I can never forget the sun. The heat of summer is dry there as if the light carried an impalpable dust; dry, breathless heat that will not let the skin respire, but swathes up the dry fire in the blood. But beyond the heat and light, I felt the presence of the sun as I felt it in the solitary valley, the presence of the resistless forces of the universe; the sun burned in the sky as I stood and pondered. Is there any theory, philosophy, or creed, is there any system or culture, any formulated method able to meet and satisfy each separate item of this agitated pool of human life? By which they may be guided, by which hope, by which look forward? Not a mere illusion of the craving heart - something real, as real as the solid walls of fact against which, like drifted seaweed they are dashed; something to give each separate personality sunshine and a flower in its own existence now; something to shape this million-handed labour to an end and outcome that will leave more sunshine and more flowers to those who must succeed? Something real now, as I stand and the sun burns. Can any creed, philosophy, system, or culture endure the test and remain unmolten in this fierce focus of human life……..

Richard Jeffries, The Story of My Heart (Duckworth & Co., London, 1883)

Dragons

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A Dictionary of Fabulous Beasts

Among the oldest of mythological creatures, dragons appear in the traditions of virtually all peoples back to the beginning of time. Because of this widespread adoption the dragon appears in numerous forms, and local traditions have been created around any of them, crediting this tribe of monsters with many attributes. In their earliest form dragons were associated with the Great Mother, the water god and the warrior sun god; in these capacities they had the power to be both beneficent and destructive and were all-powerful creatures in the universe. Because of these qualities dragons assumed the roles take by Osiris and Set in Egyptian mythology.

The dragon’s form arose from this particular power of control over the waters of the earth and gave rise to many of the attributes singled out by different peoples as the whole myth developed. They were believed to live at the bottom of the sea, where they guarded vast treasure hoards, very frequently of pearls; rain clouds and thunder and lightning were believed to be the dragon’s breath, hence the fire-breathing monster. The significance of the dragon was its control over the destiny of mankind. As the myth developed in the western world dragons came to represent the chaos of original matter with the result that with man’s awakening conscience a struggle arose, and the created order constantly challenged the dragon’s power. This type of dragon was considered by many to be the intermediate stage between a demon and the Devil and as such came into Christian belief. However, in the Eastern world the dragon adopted a rather different significance; he was essentially benevolent, a son of heaven, and controlled the watery elements of the universe. These dragons were companions of kings, and particularly guarded royal treasures...

The dragon is the enemy of the sun and the moon both in Eastern and Western mythology, and is believed to be responsible for eclipses. These occur when the dragon is attempting to swallow either of the heavenly bodies; which accounts for the dragon’s appearance in primitive astronomy. In Armenian traditions, however, the fire and lightning god had powers to stay the dragon’s control of the heavens... A quite general belief was the dragon’s association with death. A dead man was thought to become a dragon, while dragons were believed to be the guardians of treasures in burial chambers (In Norse myth, one of the sons of Hreidmar, Fafnir, who with his brother slew his father out of greed for his golden treasure, turned himself into a dragon and lay on the gold, only to be slain by the hero Sigurd (Wagner’s Siegfried). Anglo-Saxon burial mounds which held treasure became known as the ‘Hills of the Dragon’. Dragon’s teeth planted, would grow into an army of men, a strange association with reincarnation; In the Greek legend of Cadmus his army was decimated by a serpent; he slew the monster and on Athene’s orders planted the teeth, whereupon a host of armed men, the Sparti, sprang up...

Because the dragon was the natural enemy of man, his death became the ultimate goal; consequently there are innumerable battles between gods and dragons, saints and dragons, and , in the medieval world, knights and dragons. The dragon eventually became associated with chivalry and romance, and tales of knights’ feats in emulating St George and gaining a fair lady abound. It became a great honour to slay a dragon, and until this feat was achieved a knight could not be considered of the first rank: indeed, dragons almost seem to exist simply so that a hero can kill them…

In Egyption mythology there is the conflict between Horus and Typhon, in Babylonia the Chaldean Tiamat was overcome by Marduk, in Greek legends the dragon fought on the side of the Titans and attacked Athene, who flung him into the heavens, where he became a constellation around the Pole Star; Hercules encountered and killed the dragon Ladon while fulfilling his eleventh labour. In Scandinavian literature Beowulf was slain by a dragon.

The number of saints who encountered dragons is endless, St George being the most famous. St George reputedly had three marks on his body, one being a dragon on his chest. After successful battles against the Saracens he went to Lybia where a dragon was living in a lake near the town of Sylene. This dragon demanded to be fed daily with a virgin. When St George arrived the king’s daughter Sabra was to be sacrificed; he gallantly offered to fight the dragon, wounded it, and attached it to the maiden’s girdle who led it to the city to receive its dues from citizens. The exact reason for St George being adopted as the patron saint of England is obscure. Other saints who encountered dragons include St Keyne, St Guthlas and St Martha. This act in Christian terms symbolised the triumph of Christ over evil. The symbolism associated with the dragon appealed particularly to the medieval world... In medieval alchemy the dragon was the symbol of mercury and subsequently came to be used as the alchemist’s sign...

By Richard Barber and Anne Riches – Macmillan 1971

Dreaming stories

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Karen on top of Hay Tor 2007

Dreaming stories tell of the ancestor spirits who created the land
and everything on it.

Aunty Beryl Carmichael, New South Wales 2004

A Hymn for Hawker of Morwenstow

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Hay Tor 2007
God’s Spirit Thrills the Conscious Stone

All material things are but the sacraments of God
This universe, this welkin now,
These myriad stars and Symbols bright

Hawker was but a seer of sacramental visions.
“God’s spirit thrills the conscious stone”.

Beliefs in spirits of leaf and stone
Abounded all around him there
The Cornish soil it fed his soul

Hawker was but a seer of sacramental visions.
“God’s spirit thrills the conscious stone”.

To those who laughed and scorned his Way
He uttered his creed and did not sway
Hes lightened our path with his spiritual song

Hawker was but a seer of sacramental visions.
“God’s spirit thrills the conscious stone”.

Vicky

In the White Giants Thigh

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Through throats where many rivers meet, the curlews cry,
Under the conceiving moon, on the high chalk hill,
And there this night I walk in the white giant’s thigh
Where the barren as boulders women lie longing still

To labour and love though they lay down long ago.

Through throats where many rivers meet, the women pray,
Pleading in the waded bay for the seed to flow
Though the names on their weed grown stones are rained away,

And alone in the night’s eternal, curving act
They yearn with tongues of curlews for the unconceived
And the immemorial sons of the cudgelling, hacked

Hill. Who once in gooseskin winter loved all ice leaved
In the courters’ lanes, or twined in the ox roasting sun
In the wains tonned so high that the wisps of the hay
Clung to the pitching clouds, or gay with anyone
Young as they in the after milking moonlight lay

Under the lighted shapes of faith and their moonshade
Petticoats galed high, or shy with the rough riding boys,
Now clasp me to their grains in the gigantic glade,

Who once, green countries since, were a hedgerow of joys.

Time by, their dust was flesh the swineherd rooted sly,
Flared in the reek of the wiving sty with the rush
Light of his thighs, spreadeagle to the dunghill sky,
Or with their orchard man in the core of the sun’s bush
Rough as cows’ tongues and thrashed with brambles their buttermilk
Manes, under his quenchless summer barbed gold to the bone,

Or rippling soft in the spinney moon as the silk
And ducked and draked white lake that harps to a hail stone.

Who once were a bloom of wayside brides in the hawed house
And heard the lewd, wooed field flow to the coming frost,
The scurrying, furred small friars squeal, in the dowse
Of day, in the thistle aisles, till the white owl crossed

Their breast, the vaulting does roister, the horned bucks climb
Quick in the wood at love, where a torch of foxes foams,
All birds and beasts of the linked night uproar and chime

And the mole snout blunt under his pilgrimage of domes,

Or, butter fat goosegirls, bounced in a gambo bed,
Their breasts full of honey, under their gander king
Trounced by his wings in the hissing shippen, long dead
And gone that barley dark where their clogs danced in the spring,
And their firefly hairpins flew, and the ricks ran round –

(But nothing bore, no mouthing babe to the veined hives
Hugged, and barren and bare on Mother Goose’s ground
They with the simple Jacks were a boulder of wives) –

The dust of their kettles and clocks swings to and fro
Where the hay rides now or the bracken kitchens rust
As the arc of the billhooks that flashed the hedges low
And cut the bird’s boughs that the minstrel sap ran red.
They from houses where the harvest kneels, hold me hard,
Who heard the tall bell sail down the Sundays of the dead
And the rain wring out its tongues on the faded yard,
Teach me the love that is evergreen after the fall leaved
Grave, after Beloved on the grass gulfed cross is scrubbed
Off by the sun and Daughters no longer grieved
Save by their long desirers in the fox cubbed
Streets or hungering in the crumbled wood: to these
Hale dead and deathless do the women of the hill
Love forever meridian through the courters’ trees

And the daughters of darkness flame like Fawkes fires still.

Dylan Thomas

Vis Medicatrix Naturae

2008-01-15T12:22:00.000-08:00

“We live the life of plants, the life of animals, the life of men, and at last the life of spirits.” Sir Thomas Browne

On some day of late January, when the honey-coloured west is full of soft grey cloud, when one lone minstrel thrush is chanting to the dying light, what is the thrill that shakes us? It is not only that the delicate traceries of silver birches are tenderly dark on the illumined sky, that a star springs out of it like darting quicksilver, that the music of tone and tint has echoed last April’s song. It is something deeper than these. It is the sudden sense – keen and startling – of oneness with all beauty, seen and unseen. This sense is so misted over that it only comes clearly at such times. When it does come, we are in complete communion with the universal life. The winds are our playfellows; Sirius is our fellow-traveller; we are swept up into the wild heart of the wild. Then we know that we are not merely built up physically out of flower, feather and light, but are one with them in every fibre of our being. Then only do we have our full share in the passion of life that fills all nature; then only do we possess perfect vitality. Then we are caught into the primal beauty of earth, and life flows in upon us like an eagre. Life – the unknown quantity, the guarded secret – circles from an infinite ocean through all created things, and turns again to the ocean. This miracle that we eternally question and desire and adore dwells in the comet, in the heart of a bird, and the flying dust of pollen. It glows upon us from the blazing sun and from a little bush of broom, unveiled and yet mysterious, guarded only by its own light – more impenetrable than darkness.

The power of this life, if men will open their hearts to it, will heal them, will create them anew, physically and spiritually. Here is the gospel of earth, ringing with hope, like May mornings with bird song, fresh and healthy as fields of young grain. But those who would be healed must absorb it not only into their bodies in daily food and warmth but into their minds, because its spiritual power is more intense. It is not reasonable to suppose that an essence so divine and mysterious as life can be confined to material things; therefore, if our bodies need to be in touch with it so do our minds. The joy of a spring day revives a man’s spirit, reacting healthily on the bone and the blood, just as the wholesome juices of plants cleanse the body, reacting on the mind. Let us join in the abundant sacrament – for our bodies the crushed gold of harvest and ripe vine-clusters, for our souls the purple fruit of evening with its innumerable seed of stars.

We need no great gifts – the most ignorant of us can draw deep breaths of inspiration from the soil. The way is through love of beauty and reality, and through absorbed preoccupation with those signs of divinity that are like faint, miraculous footprints across the world. We need no passports in the freemasonry of earth as we do in the company of men; the only indispensable gifts are a humble mind and a receptive heart. We must go softly if we desire the butterfly’s confidence; we must walk humbly if we dare to ask for an interpretation of this dream of God.

No accident of environment or circumstance need cut us off from Nature. Her spirit stirs the flowers in a town window-box, looks up from the eyes of a dog, sounds in the chirp of grimy city sparrows. From an observation hive in a London flat the bee passes out with the same dumb and unfathomable instinct that drove her from her home on Hybla of old. We may pry into her daily life, but her innermost secrets are as inviolable and as fascinating to us as they were to Virgil, watching from the beech-tree shade.

It does not matter how shut in we are. Opportunity for wide experience is of small account in this as in other things; it is depth that brings understanding and life. Dawn, seen through a sick woman’s window, however narrow, pulses with the same fresh wonder as it does over the whole width of the sea. A branch of flushed wild-apple brings the same joy as the mauve trumpet-flower of the tropics. One violet is as sweet as an acre of them. And it often happens – as if by a kindly law of compensation – that those who have only one violet find the way through its narrow purple gate into the land of God, while many who walk over dewy carpets of them do not so much as know that there is a land or a way.

The primal instincts can seldom be so dead that no pleasure or kinship wakens at the thronging of these vivid colours and mysterious sounds. Here is a kingdom of wonder and of secrecy into which we can step at will, where dwell nations whose very language is forever unknown to us, whose laws are not our laws, yet with whom we have a bond, because we are another expression of the life that created them. Here we find beauty that takes away the breath, romance that tingles to the finger-tips. We think that there is some deep meaning in it all, if we could only find it; sometimes we catch an echo of it – in a plover’s cry, in the silence before a storm. So we listen, hearing a faint call from afar. It is this sense of mystery – unfading, because the veil is never lifted – that gives glory to the countryside, tenderness to atmosphere. It is this that sends one man to the wilds, another to dig a garden; that sings in a musician’s brain; that inspires the pagan to build an altar and the child to make a cowslip-ball. For in each of us is implanted the triune capacity for loving this fellow and nature and the Creator of them. These loves may be latent, but they are there; and unless they are all developed we cannot reach perfect manhood or womanhood. For the complete character is that which is in communion with most sides of life – which sees, hears, and feels most – which has for its fellows the sympathy of understanding, for nature the love that is without entire comprehension, and for the mystery beyond them the inexhaustible desire which surely prophesies fulfillment somewhere.

Earth is not only the mother of the young, the strong, the magnificent, whose tried muscles and long-limbed grace are the embodiment of her physical life, in whose eager glance burns the vitality of her spirit: she is also the pitiful mother of those who have lost all; she will sing lullabies to them instead of battle-songs; she will pour her life into them through long blue days and silver nights; she will give back the mirth and beauty that have slipped through their fingers. When participation in man’s keen life is denied, it is not strange if laughter dies. In the sirocco of pain it is not surprising if joy and faith are carried away. So many sit by the wayside begging, unconscious that the great Giver is continually passing down the highways and hedges of nature, where each weed is wonderful. So many are blind and hopeless, yet they have only to desire vision, and they will see that through His coming the thickets are quickened into leaf and touched with glory. Out in this world the spirit that was so desolate, lost in the strange atmosphere of physical inferiority, may once more feel the zest that he thought was gone forever. And this zest is health: sweeping into the mind and into those recesses of being beyond the conscious self, it overflows into the body. Very often this great rush of joy, this drinking of the freshets of the divine, brings back perfect health. Even in diseases that are at present called incurable, and that are purely physical, no one will deny the immense alleviation resulting from this new life. It is possible that, as the spiritual ties between man and nature grow stronger, all disease may vanish before the vitality that will stream into us so swiftly, so easily, because it will not be confined to one channel. A man who holds direct intercourse with the cosmic life through his heart and mind knows a glad comeradeship with cloud and tree; there dwells with him a consciousness of surrounding splendour – of swift currents, marvels underfoot and overhead; he has a purpose in waking each morning, a reason for existing – he clings to the beauty of earth as to a garment, and he feels that the wearer of the garment is God.

Beauty and Joy and Laughter are necessities of our being, and nature brims with them. There are some things that always bring joy – a ripple of song in winter, the blue flash of a kingfisher down-stream, a subtle scent that startles and waylays. The coming of spring brings it – the first crocus pricking up, dawn a moment earlier day by day, the mist of green on honeysuckle hedges in February, the early arabis, spicily warm, with the bees’ hum about it. The flawless days of May bring it – when big white clouds sail leisurely over the sky, when the ‘burning bush’ is in the height of its beauty, and white lilac is out, and purple lilac is breaking from the bud, and chestnut spires are lengthening, and the hawthorn will not be long. Out in the fresh, green world, where thrushes sing so madly, the sweets of the morning are waiting to be gathered – more than enough for all, low at our feet, higher than we can reach, wide enough even for the traveling soul. Joy rushes in with the rain-washed air, when you fling the window wide to the dawn and lean out into the clear purity before the light, listening to the early ‘chuck-chuck’ of the blackbird, watching the pulse of colour beat higher in the east. Joy is your talisman, when you slip out from the sleeping house, down wet and gleaming paths into the fields, where dense canopies of cobwebs are lightly swung from blade to blade of grass. Then the air is full of wings; birds fly in and out of the trees, scattering showers of raindrops as they dash from a leafy chestnut or disappear among the inner fastnesses of a fir. Pinions of dark and pinions of day share the sky, and over all are the brooding wings of unknown presences. The east burns; the hearts of the birds flame into music; the wild singing rises in a swelling rhythm until, as the first long line of light creeps across the meadows, the surging chorus seems to shake the treetops.

Laughter need not be lost to those that are cut off from their fellows. The little creatures of earth are the court jesters of all that dwell in the hall of sorrow. And although more insight and love are needed to enjoy their subtle humour than to enjoy our own, we have an ample reward of unfailing and spontaneous laughter. As vicarious grief is the keenest of all, so is vicarious laughter.

One flower of germander speedwell may be the magic robe that clothes us with the beauty of earth. As the maiden found her bridal garment in the fairy nut, so we may find in the folded speedwell-bud glimmering raiment to cover our homespun. It has the same strength of structure, wonder of tint and mystery of shadow as all natural things. Awakened by its minute perfection, the mind travels softly away through chequered woods, over the swinging sea, to mountains gleaming like a medieval paradise, forests of sumach, lakes of pink and blue lilies. Returning as from a trance, weary with splendour, it realizes that nature’s beauty can never be perfectly grasped. Yet, since in essence it is the same wherever a blade of grass appears or a bird’s shadow passes over; since the fact of seeing it, in whatever degree, is the precious thing – let us go out along the lovely ways that lead from our doors into the heart of enchantment. Ceasing for a time to question and strive, let us dare to be merely receptive – stepping lightly over the dewy meadows, brushing no blue dust from the butterfly’s wing. Then, if life is suddenly simplified by the removal of all that we hold most dear, we shall know the way to other things, not less precious. We shall know of long, green vistas, carpeted with speedwell, ascending to a place of comfort, and the blue butterfly will lead us into peace.

These three – Joy, Laughter, and Beauty – are the broadest river-ways down which may flow the essential life which is health and youth – beyond thought, beyond time, a sea that fills eternity – yet nearer than the air we breathe, immanent in the humblest creature, making material things transparent as a beech-leaf in the sun. And because those who most need its influx have only the least of earth’s graces to watch, this book is concerned with muted skies, minute miracles, songs of the night, and the proud humility of the germ that holds in its littleness the Lord of Immortality.

Mary Webb: The Collected Works of Mary Webb, Jonathan Cape (1929)

Are there certain places upon the earth

2008-01-15T12:18:00.000-08:00

Is there a spiritual geography? Are there certain places upon the earth, which are more or less, attuned to certain modes of consciousness? And if so, do such qualities belong to the earth itself, to certain qualities of light, or sound, or scent, and elemental spirits who inhabit such places, or kinds of place? Or do people of a certain cast of mind import to the land their own qualities?

Kathleen Raine, The Lions Mouth (1908 – 2003)