Paleo-Nate

Hart-Crown and the Victory

2011-11-23T20:01:00.001-08:00

Hart-Crown and the Victory

I was alone on the American plains. It was autumn now – the bladetips of grass were white in the mornings. The stems brushed my thighs up to my ears. I walked with untense arms, letting them drag over the frosted stalks of big bluestem, little bluestem and indian grass. I walked eastward where the grass blew more lowly along the wide lakes. I did not halt till I came to the Onandaga, the keepers of the Central Fire of Longhouse Nations. A White Woman fled out from them on a white horse, riding over sunset grass, their icy husks glowing red. She did not stop until her steed was motionless in front of me. I got up behind her on her horse, and we fled over streams and long rows of grass bowing over brooks. We dismounted in a grassland of oaks as I looked back east and saw a sea of horsemen filling the plain. I heard a pounding echo of their hooves, and their voices whooped like trumpets. They called with surround-sound and closed any distance with their gait of long practise.

I turned to face their baritone voices, and my eyes shot camera like close to their cheeks. Their heads were like spiked towers above their mounts. Gnarled horns grew high out of each shoulder. The Iroquois leader, blood of my blood, tongue of my tongue, took up their rear, then circled to the front. He had a tall upright crown of hazel and hickory growing out of his shoulderblades and collarbones. The veins and bones of his chest were tissued with the wood. The limbs rose upward like forked spears, fingerlimbed and intertwined like wicker. His eyes glowed hazelbrown in the setting sun, and suddenly I was afraid. Around him echoed a growing crescendo of horn-voices: ‘Hiyen watha, Hiyen WATHA Hiyen WATHA, HIYEN WATHA! H I Y E N W A T H A.’

The lens of my eyes trembled. I zoomed in to an army of thousands. And the man at their head could turn them with one motion of hand or foot or head. He dismounted and cleared the nearest stream, stepped over the bent-grass and came at us under our tree. I climbed up the oak with the White Bride, her garments silken and soft, her limbs round and alabaster. Once up the tree, we met a rival moiety, the people of the Bear. They told me that when this chief of Deerfolk – Deganawida of the Hadinioñgwaiiu – came at me up the tree, I must stab him through the throat and not be soft or hesitant in my thrust. ‘Do not be cruel as those slow to deeds are wont to be – be swift, or we shall kill you ourselves. Death is a mercy in both cases.’

I looked into his eyes to read their gravity. No levity or cruelty shone in them. But he hunkered in the oaklimbs like a crouched cougar, eyes unfocused in scattervision. He continued, ‘Death is a mercy in both cases, as those with bare feet held under Long House coals know too well. Keep your White Bride, or we shall take her for ourselves. Take your knife. Here he comes beneath you – your friend and foe – Hart-Crown of the Stag.’

Hart-Crown’s copper arms grasped the tree-limbs like hard wire, and he slung himself up with ease. His people saw fight as holy rite more than enmity. This made him climb at me calmly – then he smiled, and reached a hand toward me to hail me. I took it, pulling him up, and his grip was terrible in its strength. Up thrust his head, and his crown of horns grew out of the sinews of his breastbones, taller than elk-antlers.

And when I saw him, I loved him. I spoke to him ‘Friend!’ I wanted to worship him. He was the Great Peacemaker – Deganawida. That is their Immanuel, a Meshiach, heralding reign upon reign of peace.

‘If you are not brave enough to kill him, we are brave enough to kill you,’ the Bear men told me. I drew my long knife and thrust it downwards with a twist into Hart-Crown’s neck above his collarbone. The blood fell on my hand and red all over the White Bride.

The White Bride trotted slowly beside me. I’d not given her the sanctuary she chased after, and I’d slain a leader I loved. But when I looked back, I saw the sun set over his high horns of hickory. I saw him hanging limp from the tree boughs. Then on the ground beneath the tree walked a man, and he circled the tree nine times. When done, he picked up a hazel fiddle and a willow bow strung with golden hairs, and he played my victory.

I retreated. I retreated west from Longhouse Lands, and I did not see the White Bride again. I walked alone. Dusk fell deep on Lakota Savannah. I quickened my pace and began to lope on two legs, then on four. I bounded on my paws. Spent, I threw myself down and slept in a prairie oak-grove, and I dreamt. Rhythms of canines lolled over me:

Blacksky on frost field,

Shadowtree on slumber-den,

dusk over lakota savannah.

I watched and I waited

under oak tree

on hunger-hill.

Lolled for bloodtooth and bloodcheek,

reddened with life.

So a big black wolf, a she-wolf, brought me food.

Piece by piece, she fed me.

Loping, she-lupus came and went.

Tossle-mane, raven-fell, tangle-thick, she lay near me.

Side by side, we tore and ate.

She sought me, warmed me, braved me, outloped me.

In dark of night, she shifted –

stood up wolven

and woman.

Thick black hair on whitesky skin.

Do not know her,

Never saw her awake.

With her I’ll share

and share alike

the carcass.

Slacktrack

2011-10-25T05:05:00.000-07:00

Slacktrack

Slowly

stalling,

neigh calling,

horse-sighing

nay.

Stallion heaving

breast-swollen breath.

Hot throat, clammy neck,

hoarse.

Sinews welter,

withers twitch

with weather sweat

on lather neck.

Dimlight dawn fondles

his fetlocks,

wet-clung with frost,

wreathed in white dew,

snowhair damp on hazel-locks.

Muzzle heat,

Nostril mist,

he missed the pounding herd

on horse-mate steppe.

Now footcuffed,

he coughs.

Sacked,

he bows,

sag-eared.

I prick my ears, pry my eyes,

feel stung

on tip of tongue

stuck to my roof

of horse-mouth,

wracked by words

wrought on wind,

spell-written,

twisted from bit,

wrung from bridle.

I trace his pace

with racing step,

with sudden fall,

braked.

Sigh-bitten,

known in his nose,

he passes by my sky-window -

my fleeting car riding by.

I stare out

at star-lit mane,

hushed

by his faltered rush.

Stagger foot.

Slow from fold,

slow bridle gate.

Bridal gait sloth,

now life-cut.

No mate.

He knew by their walk it led away,
He knew by their stealth, they stole him.

Stolen from stall, slackened slow,
His hoof-fall fell quiet.
He smelt on their hands the sweat of a fall,
He felt on the wind the breath of a stop,
He heard the train down a life-long rail,
on the tracks of unknown days,
the way he wondered why clop.

He nosed the rime-sighs of night
under heft of heavy riders.

He reared at their whispers,

at tones unknown.

Their hush-mumbles rang

in his marrow and bone.

Firesky smouldered

on eaves of wood

in the beams of dawn,

on edges drawn

in the margins of night.
He tracked the chart of days

on the footprint folds

where he danced
a horse trance,

stepped a last trot,
as lovers in Llanfihangel

careered and pranced

in red-fire hall

in the late dew

of a late Fall.

–Nathan Paul Hillman, 24/25 October 2011

COSMOGRAPH: The Alpenaxis

2011-10-17T11:30:00.001-07:00

I changed trains along the Rhine where it elbowed away from France along the north border of a weird country. I was next told to catch what people called the Gleitenbahn, the Glide Rail, all the way to The Academy, a long arm of a new UK university system. As a new non-British initiate, I was requried to matriculate upfront with my passport.

I walked dutifully down a long, sterile corridor – you know, the kind in airports that would hypnotise you or turn you into a Zenner if you weren’t so stressed about making your plane. By the time I reached the end of the wing, I was forced to walk through a narrow gap of opaque, bullet-proof dividers until I reached a British official’s desk. Each officer was dressed in dark blue – almost black like a bruise. We did an heroic exchange of paperwork and I came away with an ornate visa stamped in my passport. The stamp was shaped like an octagon on an axis.

When I exited into the night air, I craned my neck to see the tops of fir trees. Their rows blinded my vision – I reeled back and flung back my head, trying to see their tops. They were so blue-black they were schwarrrz. Yes, schwarrrz, the way a German lecturer once pronounced the word when he was describing the Black Forest. The trees hemmed in the Academy Campus, blocking my view.

Then I looked south. I saw one silver top, a sharp peak. It began to spin on an axis. I stepped through the trees and into the high, black air. The stars glinted near my fingers. As if I’d the eyes of a satellite camera, I saw pinprick lights over a land of pinnacles. The land turned like a ragged wheel. It ran spinning up its own axis, then spun back down, then stood still. The national borders gleamed beneath me like a puzzle frame made of lazer, making the shape of one helluva cookie – Helvetia.

She stood there still under the midnight, a gleam of icy lake and mercury mountains. Her land rolled out beneath me, then grew bigger and bigger until my feet stood firm. I bent over, fingered the groove of a valley, massaged a mountain peak, trolled my fingernails on the bottom of an icy mere. I crouched down to dip my hand in the southwest depths of the Bodensee, the Bottom Sea – Lake Constance. Then I sat down inside a stone amphitheatre as wide as the nation. Three sat in the audience. One, an Alemannian, got up and walked over to me. He spoke Switzer, High Alemannic – no French, no Italian, no Rhaeto-Romance.

‘Don’t you need a Bierhalle? Turn around.’

I obediently turned my back and saw a steep-gabled lodge of wood, high as a mountain, built on a plateau of sheer rock. A spire of mountain, like a conical helmet, spiked upwards from the top of the lodge. I strode to the west flank and stepped onto the plateau – one step. I stood hundreds of feet above. I gladly gripped the weight of the door. It was as thick as the length of my arm. Made of cherry maybe? I was possessed with a desire for red – red wood, red leather, red ale, red flesh, red faces. I clopped over the planked floor. My feet sounded like hooves. My face beamed. I looked at my hand – it was ruddy in the red light. The guests were fiery, but no one howled or bellowed. Instead, they droned in deep voices like instruments planted in the roots of the Beer Hall. They whispered like Finns in a sauna. They sang. Not like hoarse-skreaking sportsmen, or lung-belting soldiers: They sang like wolves on the tundra.

They weren’t quite Swiss – they were High Bavarians of the Silvretta Alps, skirting the interzone between Austria and Switzerland. Their hall was made wholly of wood and stone. They sat on benches, on tables, in seat-niches carven into the walls. The hall’s central axis was a black mountain, also shaped and shelved, filled with beakers, goblets, tankards, truncheons, flagons. Along the outer walls sat Gesellen – ‘hall companions’ – splayed over benches draped with deerhides. They sat in chairs built into recesses inside the walls, with seat-backs shaped like boars, wolves and stags. Whenever my eyes met theirs, the Gesellen would lean their upper bodies sidelong off their seats, crane their heads sideways, nod, shout my health, then sit down hard as they dashed their tankards on the wood.

‘Prost!’ I nodded, holding their gaze longer than the Anglo-American world allowed. I sat down in the human sway of the benches. The voices rose and fell like rivers, babbling to a trickle, at last to a single draught. The banter was poured straight down, fearless, straight up.

My bench-fellow leaned his head toward mine. ‘What do you think, mein Bube? Want to join our firehood, our heartwood, our hot souls? Want to be raked over good hot coals?’

I opened my passport and fingered my visa. The Geselle looked on in wry humour. ‘Ach, Akademie, Akademos, “of a Silent Place.” Used to mean that, you know – could have. Is your Academy so silent then? Drivel from the betters drunk by the lowers, the drunken lowers. There’s always a revel – and it’s always loud. Silence from above. Bellowing from below. The loudness of ... loud silence. They talk about everything but each other. They know everything but each other.’

At last I got up to leave. One of my companions stood up, set a weighty hand on my right shoulder, looked up the mountain and spoke out in strange Bavarian: ‘Du, hiar schraibmma Komerodschoft med gross’m K.’ Here we spell Kameradschaft with a Big K. A great big K.

I went downstairs, beneath Beer Hall and deep inside Beer Hall Mountain. I walked into a living room parlour. A colossal Kachelofen, a tile stove, rose from ground to roof and spanned the height and bredth of a wall. Doors of cast iron opened at its mouth – the rest was tawny tile, smooth as marble. Its perimeters formed benches and seats. I sat down on the hot tiles to warm my middles. I peered through a tiny passage and saw a wide-hipped woman boiling water. She turned and stared at me where I sat near her kitchen. I fidgeted, and asked, ‘Entschuldigen Sie mir bitte, darf ich hier rein? Pardon me, ma’am, may I come in?’

‘Du darfst, You’re allowed.’

-composed by Nathan Paul Hillman, 17 October 2011 & 14 April 2011

Slitherworm

2011-10-10T09:03:00.000-07:00

       I’m walking like a giant, a hill at a step. I step over valleys. Do not let me wound my bare feet on the biting twigs of trees. The plants slither far below. They crawl beneath my foot-fingers. The valleys grow wide – I can’t step over them. I touch down low the tips of my toes, then jerk my feet up, nervously, draw them up to the hill. I hunker on high ground, reclining.

     ‘Glass of wine? Reddest we have.’

‘Thank you’, says I. ‘If I spill, it won’t spoil your divan. It’s a pretty scarlet.’

     ‘Do you like my hill? It’s a blood-red couch above swarming holes below. Here we avoid infection by means of comfort. We fight cold with warmth, while you fight cold with cold.’

     ‘I’ve been stepping on snakes.’

     ‘They can’t hurt you if you learn the right walk. Walk on them right and they can’t bite. They can’t enter your body if you don’t commit your weight. Don’t get too carried away with gravity. If you dismiss gravity, that’s when you get carried away, and lifted up.’

     I look way down, down and nether-down, beneath the nest of couches on high to the nest of worms below. All my friends and family sit flushed and happy around me, cradled in the crook of the hill, the nook of their nest on high.

     Down below the earth moves in a filigree of flesh. The ground slithers, purple, green and blue. The valleys heave with worms. I step down, looking at greener hills further off and further north. Egypt – land of bread and sweets and soft lords – you’re no home to me.

     I’ve a long way to walk. But will I get to keep my legs? I use them - I wade into the river. It's muddy and brown, opening into ponds between rivers. Rivers and ponds. Slither.

     'Is it safe to wade, wade and drink?'

     'Don't fret, have at. Don't worry at the waters that go under. The underwaters will keep you. Don't defile our Nile!'

     I look into the water and see the depths slither. They teem with sinewy serpentine forms with heads like fanged puff adders, bodies like eels, mouths like lamprey mouths, bulbous eyes like toad eyes. I probe one with a long knobby branch - it sticks to the stick. I pull upward - the thing coils out of water, stuck to my rod, to my finger-tree. I recoil. ‘Those things are vicious’, says my uncle. ‘They’re called Fishstrikers and they’re killing all the fish.’ My father, trying to be an optimist, says in a calm, curious voice: ‘But have you seen their eyes? They’ve beautiful eyes. Beautiful eyes.’

     I walk on. I step to the music of the charmer - right on top of the worms. Worms in the bottoms of the hollows.

     I see a distant friend in the distance. He's far, closing in. He charges me, remarking, ‘If you want to avoid infection, all you need to do is get a pendulating lilting motion going between the rises and the dips. See here, watch me. Do as I do.’ And my friend goes off bounding, singing as he lopes, lunging up, falling back, care-free on his free feet. ‘Don’t get attached – get lost in the movement. Do you think I got snakes? I aint got a wormy beast in me.’

     I give it a try. I go on a long journey, up and down. Up and down. Down and up.

     I look at the veins in my forearm, the rivers of my flesh. I see blue under the membrane. Not the blue sky above – but the blue sky below. Something like a thousand tiny ribbons is moving through my blood, my blue blood. Larvae. Snake babies, sneaking into my Innermost In. Inn-vading the Inn-keeper. Won’t the worms grow until they burst the veins?

     The Egyptian princess sits on her divan, a toad for the nematodes. She’s afflicted by little dragons inside her. I hear her cry – ‘I walked too long in the valleys, tried too long to reach the hills. Now snakes are crawling out of my legs. My rotting legs. So amputated, how will I walk to Paradise?’

~~~Written by Nathan Hillman

My Influences in Fiction:

Kafka
Novalis
Sigmund Freud
George MacDonald
J.R.R. Tolkien
David Lindsay (Voyage to Arcturus)
William Morris (Well at the World’s End and The Roots of the Mountains)
G.K. Chesterton (Manalive)
James Joyce
Snorri Sturluson (Snorra Edda)
Elder Edda, Beowulf, Muspilli, Heliand, Anglo-Saxon & Old High German narrative poetry, Scots-English ballads, Danish & Swedish ballads, northern European folksong
Irish, Native American, Uralian, and Siberian mythology & narrative
Old and New Testaments
Tarjei Vesaas
Sigrid Undset
Knut Hamsun (especially Pan, Mysterier, Sult, Landstrykere)
E. A. Wyke-Smith

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

QUOTATIONS OF SOURCES BEHIND CREATIVE WRITING EXCERPT

Upon Corpse Strand, far from the sun,
she saw a hall – its doors open North;
Its roof shafts dripped with venom drops –
That hall’s wound with spines of serpents.
(Völuspá, ‘The Prophecy of the Seeress’, The Elder Edda, Strophe 38. Cōdex Rēgius, Iceland, 1270s)

‘Wrap the emerging end of the worm around a stick and slowly pull it out.’
(Ebers Papyrus, 1550 BC)

WORD LORE

Dracunculiasis: Latin, ‘affliction with little dragons’

Other names: Dracunculosis, Dracontiasis, Guinea worm infection, Medina worm, Serpent worm, Dragon worm, Pharaoh worm, Avicenna worm

DREAMS

My whole life, I’ve had dreams of snakes and worms that bite or burrow. The first dream I ever remember, at age 4 or 5, featured our garden shrub turning into worm-limbs with straining snake-heads like cobras.

GLIMPSE OF AN HISTORICAL WOMAN INFILTRATED BY ‘LITTLE DRAGONS’:

The Manchester Mummy Project (1980s – present): In the mid 1980s, a calcified male Guinea worm (Dracunculus) was found in the abdominal cavity of a royal teenage mummy girl (1000s BC, New Kingdom, Egypt). Her lower legs – the usual exit point of the female worm – had been amputated. It’s not easy to wind out the worm without breaking its spaghetti body – and there may be dozens more to grow and writhe out through the skin. The exit holes lead to gangrene & ulceration over time.

SOURCES

Clinical Microbiology Reviews. American Society for Microbiology: Dracunculiasis (Guinea Worm Disease) and the Eradication Initiative, April 2002. (http://cmr.asm.org/cgi/content/full/15/2/223#Morphology, 2011)

‘Dracontiasis in Antiquity’, P. B. Adamson. Medical History, 32: 204-209, 1988. (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1139858/pdf/medhist00063-0093.pdf )

The Ebers Papyrus: A New English Translation, Commentaries, and Glossaries. Paul Ghalioungui. (Cairo: Academy of Scientific Research and Technology, 1987). (Quotation from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebers_Papyrus, 15 July 2011)

Edda. Die Lieder des Codex Regius nebst verwandten Denkmälern. Gustav Neckel, ed. by Hans Kuhn (Carl Winter, Heidelberg: 1936, 1962, 1983).

The Imaging of Tropical Diseases: Guinea Worm Infection (Dracunculiasis). (http://www.isradiology.org/tropical_deseases/tmcr/chapter27/intro.htm)

Numbers 21:6. English Standard Version

Under Wraps: Rosalie David in Conversation. Interviewed 6 February 2001. A Publication of the Archaeological Institute of America. (http://www.archaeology.org/online/features/mummies/ , 2011)

The Table of the Tree

2011-08-21T16:16:00.001-07:00

Dream, Aug 15, 2011: I climbed the flanking planks of the Great White Porch in Michigan(Patterson Rd) and reached a beech, wrapping my leglimbs around treelimbs until I was in the tree-crown along the roof and porch-eaves. Below me stood a table lit by bough-swung lamps hung from the tree, its trunk rippling up the middle of the porch floors. It twined and wound round the laden table as I scaled down its branches to sit with family over a heartening meal.

Wolf Alive

2011-06-27T12:01:00.000-07:00

Dream dreamt on Summer Solstice, 2011:

While out walking, I saw a huge, black, starving wolf bound to a steel cable in a garden. Vipers and cobras had been set out, guarding the length of the wolf's reach, to hem him in and cow his spirit. I brought the pining w(olf)lupus food and water day by day, using sticks and rubber snakes to push and bully the snakes into the tyrant sham-owner's house. Day after day, the wolf pawed and nosed me when I came back, until one day he laid his heavy feet on my chest while I rested next to his warm body. We lay weary side by side, lonely for touch, trying to regain our sapped strength. From this point we could not be separated. At long last, finally daring, I took off the wolf's chains and freed him from the line. As soon as he was free, a red collar of silk appeared around the black-fur neck. After a murmured exchange, I pulled myself onto his back and rode him like a horse to the house door.

Dreams of Ascending and Descending

2011-05-18T14:13:00.000-07:00

I fell asleep and dreamed that two middle-aged female folkdancers tried to trick me out of my debit card by seducing me into a hotel room adjoined to the dance hall. On their bed I found, in the nick of time, piles of old debit cards which they had pickpocketed from other dancers. I checked my wallet and stormed out of the room. The next evening during the same dance party, a food competition took place. The idea was to cook an appropriate, symbolic or favourite meal for the person you most loved or admired, place the ready meal on their bed pillow, and then have an event-wide taste contest for all the dishes. The winning dish would be paraded by the winning couple - either a new or an established romance. I went to my own bedchamber and found smack upon my pillow a large leafy 'Welsh Salad', and it was labeled as such in big letters. Runes had been scrawled on my blankets and walls, but when I read them I realised that the language and lettering had been bastardised. Some guests came by and I tried to explain to them how Anglo-Saxon and Norse worked ... to no avail. The same two female folkdancers appeared in my room, dipping their bare fingers into my Welsh Salad and putting the dressing covered bits into their mouths, licking their fingers, sticking their fingers back in the greens as they said "mm mmm mmmm!". They asked me why I liked Welsh things, Norse things, Irish things, English things. I began to give them a beautiful reply and then stopped: They were mocking me. Why should I tell them anything? The Welsh Salad wasn't Welsh food after all, nor made in my honour. They had not the slightest understanding of me, my devotions, passions, or timewoven branches of influence. [17 April 2011]

I dreamed that I walked in the sky with friends upon 'monkey bar bridges', connected by spiral stairways up & down. I decided to crawl along a sky-way by myself, going into a metal tube twisting & spiralling through the sky, big enough for one adult to inch through feet-first. The sky-tunnel was filled with children playing. I become claustrophobic, worried I won't get through, or that I'll get trapped by people somewhere in its long twisting length. [20 April 2011]

Two days later, I go on a 'history walk' in a German city. A railway with only one above-ground crossing courses through town. Cars & people must use underpasses. I go down into tunnels on the tour: the Guide takes us from room to room, in which a living history exhibit can be seen across all eras as if it's occurring in present time. 18th & 17th centuries seem most widespread. Period Germans sit around long banquet tables. Guide points out 'Königin Elisabet' & describes her reign. She sounds & looks a lot like our Queen Elisabeth I, I remark. ! We eventually come to a room entitled 'Scientific Racism' & the Guide cleverly points out how it is a far worse form of racism than that of any earlier period. A black man present interprets this as a novel idea: "Scientific racism must have led to unthinkable atrocities", he says. [22 April 2011]

The following day I'm in a Rem-Wisconsin work residence - a rather stuffy house, and I'm trying my best to support my client when my close friend (Bret Sherfinski) suggests I escape with him through the walls. We wind through passageways in the walls between the rooms until we find an opening onto the roof. At this point, he disappears. I'm left trying to find a way down from the roof. He roars up with a pickup truck pulling a wagging wagon. I motion for him to drive the wagon closer to the house eaves so I can safely jump down. He doesn't get it and stays put. I yell at him then to push the wagon closer. Still he doesn't do it. I yell again, putting it in the firmest, plainest words. He doesn't move. He's impossible, I think. I then notice the wagon is in free motion, distached from the truck, wheeling toward me. It makes a curve and swings lengthwise past the house. I leap down as it passes - using the wagon's own momentum to break my own fall. As I land, my feet push the wagon horizontally faster, and I crouch in it as it speeds away from the house. Escape from America? [23 April 2011]

Then five days after that I find food thrown away outside which I try to salvage by cooking. The food consists of gigantic beef hearts - and I look on all the meat with concern and value, and decide I will cook it, save it, eat it, thrive off it. I come upon a lame husky dog - the dog and friend of my childhood - whom I heal by raising him to walk beside me, and guiding him between two walking poles attached to a halter. Soon he is his prancing self again. Next I'm indoors in a room that looks like a hair salon and I witness overweight women giving each other 'grief therapy' by cuddling each other in big chairs. [28 April 2011]

In the same sequence of sleep, I go into a huge house-hotel where students have stuffed their papers, books & tp in the lavatories, blocking them from use. Dance parties move from room to room. Former Madison co-opers fill the parties, & none would engage me with dance or conversation. Many would not even brave human eye-contact. The event shifts to a German ball with German speakers talking to me and making steady, engaged eye contact. Their dramas and balls shift from room to room as in _Russian Museum_, & I have to work to follow them or dance with them. Then I find myself on a Jutland west coast watching eel fishermen stuff long eels into groundtanks accessible through small holes - just big enough to slide an eel into. The fishermen work for a while as I watch and listen to their Danish, able to understand bits and pieces. A huge wave rises up offshore. They call to me in Danish to help them build a stone wall to protect their catch. I lift big stones to help them as they speak in clipped Jutlandic in the wind.

The scene shifts to my mom & dad's Michigan pond - which is now a longer Oval with a bridge over an inflowing stream at one end, & a house veranda leading down to the bridge, the walkboards lined with marsh flowers, sedge & reeds. I look in the water & see the whole pond slither. It's teeming with long serpentine creatures: They have heads like puff adders with fangs, bodies like eels, mouths like lamprey mouths, eyes like bulbous frog eyes. I probe one with a long stick - it sticks to the stick, coming up out of the water with Gollum eyes. In fright, I put it back. Run inside to tell Dad & Dennis Hillman (my uncle). Dennis explains to me, "Those mean things are called "Longfang Fishstrikers" & are viscious, killing all the fish in the pond." Then Dad, diplomatic & stoic, trying to be optimistic, says: "But they have beautiful eyes. Beautiful eyes." ! A jarring, apocalyptic conclusion contrasting with my own reaction: They were the most ugly water animals I'd ever seen. :-/ [28 April 2011]

The next day, I was running up a steep green hill ending in a cliff over the open ocean. I knew I was dreaming, & laughed like there was no tomorrow. I could leap six feet uphill in a single step. Someone ran next to me: "Be careful", s/he says. I said I could wake myself up anytime I needed, but why do that? Just before I get to the brow up the sea-hill, I think I've really woken up: Instead, I am telling someone *in my dream* that I'd just been 'lucid dreaming'. [29 April 2011]

Now early in May I attended a 'Welsh concert' in a banquet hall above a forest. I climbed down through floorboards into trees by swinging my body down onto limb platforms that went lower & lower till I was in a passage-maze in the ground & roots. I walked down a corridor with party decour, saw a two-feet wide passageway to right where Mark Wilkins (Wales) operated on sound systems in the walls. [5 May 2011]

Twelve days later I was bouncing up & down hills & wet, snake-filled valleys. The hills turned into couches (fellowship spots), the valleys writhed with purple, green & blue snakes, worm-like, most venomous in the world. Antedote to bites, according to one witness (Brian Matthew Hart), was to arc up & down the couches & dales bionic-man style. I leaped up & down pogo-like btw cosy sofas & snakey marsh. Then looked at the vessels in my arms - they were swimming with 'snake-larvae'. Won't they grow bigger & burst the veins? [17 May 2011]

Cosmographs - Dreams I, II, III and IV

2011-04-21T16:43:00.000-07:00

COSMOGRAPHS

Dreamt 14 April 2011

I. Middle Europe: Glide-Rail, Hotel-Hatch, Girl Rescue, The Academy, Mountain Mapland, Alpenland, the Alpen Lodge

I fly over to Europe with A.S. and land in eastern France, catching a wind-surfing airborne train called the Glide Rail eastward to a placed called the Academy in Helvetica and Raetia – the Alpenland. It swished over some kind of rails without making contact, never backtracked, never went in straight lines or made angles. It moved in spirals, arcs, circuits. A.S., a former girlfriend, resurfaced as a life companion, and joined me on the eastward rail. We overnighted with my youngest sister in a town between France and Switzerland in a strange hotel-cubby attached to the railway station. It was in lieu of a hotel or b-n-b, affordable, and provided fold-out beds, fold-out microwave, wardrobes in the wall, and space enough not to feel suffocated. Its door was human-sized, no crawl-hole door (like the Asian variety), and the bed space was wide and commodious. As I wasn’t weary, I stayed up all night, went off walking in the town and returned around 5-6am, meeting A.K., a Madison friend staying in the same cubby, at 6 a.m. on a stairwell weirdly reminiscent of my Michigan parents’ stairs. He confided in me that our fourth companion had been physically aggressing toward A.S., forcing her to hug and kiss him under the covers. I remembered her fearful near-rape experiences in Russia, and dashed up the stairs to save and comfort her. I braced my shoulder and tucked in my head for a side-body slam against the door off the momentum of a running start. Why I thought this would effectively help anything in the dream, I'm not sure. I charged the hatch door, thinking to bash it down, but found my body moved slow, inched as in slow-motion, lost force and speed, and touched the door with a soft shove by the time my shoulder made contact. More determined than before, I walked backward, reared up, and charged back at the door, shoving my shoulder off a taut hip right before making contact. Again, my taut strength went loose and slack, and my muscles limp. I could barely push on the door. I reared back and charged again, again making soft touch. This time, the door opened on its own, swinging on its hinges, as if someone had pulled back the door and let me in at that moment. I saw A.S. with hands over her face in one corner of the hotel cubby, her knees on the bed, tears covered by her fingers. My sister Sara busied herself with her luggage at the opposite end. Not far from the door itself I saw the aggressor slinking, silent as a shadow, looking at no one thing, eyes empty, body still and poised. He seemed more demon than human. I rushed at him, told him to get out and never come back or I’d squash him like a slug. I bolted over to A.S., giving her my arms, and she drew me down into the bed, crying, relieved, confiding. She told me what had happened, and we kissed and kissed, lips soft and insistent, mollifying the nerves, brushing over our fluttering mouths. This went on a long time, for hours, deep in talk and affections, until we fell asleep. We slept into the following night. At morning and after packing, I saw A.S.'s stalker slinking outside the door, and we walked past him, not speaking a word, swiftly catching an air-rail (Glide Rail, Gleitenbahn) southeastward toward Switzerland. A.S. took a further train to Moscow, leaving me at Colmar or nearby, from where I railed along the Rhine to the heart of Alpenland.

Having to change trains along the Rhine border, I couldn’t fetch all my luggage off in one go, and had to make two trips. But the Air-Rail hummed off before I could embark again, and I wandered worriedly to an Inspector to report to him my case; he advised I take a high-speed omnibus to the air-rail’s next change-over stop near Basel, and weirdly this speed-bus got me there ahead of the train and thus I fetched my overload of gear. I carted my worldly possessions to the Intake and Immatriculation Desks which existed at the bottom of long hallways in the Academy just south of the highest Alps in the heart of Switzerland, which in the dream I named 'Austria', but a map showed it wasn't. In this Switzerland, there was no French, Italian or Rhaeto-Romanisch sections - the whole region was linguistically Alemannic. Why was I so sure it was Switzerland? When I stepped off my transport, I saw the whole map of the land and its boundaries before me, tiny and clear as a satellite photo from space. A midnight, lit by stars, gleamed overhead, and beneath me all was dark except for the glow of the mountain peaks, lakes and a luminous line making up the state boundary of Switzerland. The land rolled out beneath me as a miniature of the real thing, then grew bigger and bigger before it spun on its axis like a top. It wheeled around several times before halting in its usual north-south position. Or perhaps whatever enabled me in the dream to look down on the whole land was itself spinning? When I landed in a forest next to the Academy's doors, the trees towered above me, but the nearby mountains looked my own height, strokable, denser with distance. Far-off mountains appeared vast and huge, the normal size one would expect, but I stooped over their rocky foreland to inspect their deep ravines, as if I were a Giant from another world. The other Swiss around, visitor students included, were my equal in size. Were we all giants? One could walk from the south to north border in a day (or hour?) or two, if only one didn't get trapped in the rocky chasms, or reach out and touch far-off mountain tops as if you were a creator of matter, inspecting their contour and texture. Switzerland wasn’t smaller there than it actually is in our world - everything in the dream spoke of its vastness. But somehow the humans there had grown. They could zoom in and out, touch things upclose, or withdraw small and dwarfed again.

Next I had to check in to the Academy, and I walked down a long carpeted aisle to a row of separate desks, each with special queues for different citizens, and all ending face-to-face with someone to handle Immatriculation and Intake. The place wasn't crowded - I was one of two or three others around. When I got to the desk, a man with a British accent handed me skeleton keys, books, a map, and a ticket to something called the Alpine Tour. Outside, the trees towered over me, the tallest trees I’d ever seen. Their tops were hidden in clouds. About this time I pulled out my mobile phone to ring my parents a continent away; not surprisingly, the phone had an error message in red script straight across the screen. Then to my delight I realised the Academy had issued me a new one, but I don't remember ringing anyone on it. When I arrived at the Alpine Tour, I sat myself down in an amphitheatre made of smoothed stone terraces which made wide east-west semi-circles the whole bredth of the Alps. Stars stared down in silver shafts, making mountain peaks and pools glitter. I walked down the theatre steps to get in closer to the mountains' feet. I leaned over the tall peaks, touched their tops, fingered the grooves of their dales. Either I was a giant, had telescopic vision, or the whole land had been shrunk - but the latter did not at all seem believable. If anything, the vastness of the whole area seemed increased because I could make out how big it really was in once glance. I walked east and north a few paces to a lake, the biggest in the region; its dark waters glinted in the starlight. I reached toward it with my finger, wanting to dip it in the lake. I trailed it in the water, rippling it along the shore. I let my finger trail into the silt, and spotted a deep drop along the length of the shore. A great mountain rose up from the middle of the lake. It filled all the lake’s middle, and its slopes tapered sharply down into the depths, making the lake deepest along the edges. “Don’t you know den Bodensee?” asks a recognisable voice, waggish and sarcastic. I turn to the speaker and see Andrew Bohl, a German speaking friend. He’d made his way to the Academy as well. Allured as I was by the ‘Bottom Sea’, the German designation for Lake Constance, something else stole my attention as soon as I laid eyes on it. It was a timber-framed lodge, rising south of me high as a mountain, built on a mountain plateau and gabled on the tops. I turned around and walked in its door at mountain level, treading on the planked floor which ran in a circle around a mountain forming the lodge’s axis. It was a circular Bierhalle. Along the wall sat Gesellen (hall comrades) in booths, ornately carved, upon benches built into snugs in the wall with seat-backs made of carven stags, dark as darkest wood. When my eyes caught those of the Gesellen, they would lean their upper bodies off their seats, stretching their heads sideways and nodding, then dash their tankards on the wood tables to my health. “Prost!” I nodded, eyeing each one and pleased to the heart. I saw a side door at stair-head, and filed downwards to a lower floor. To my left spanned a huge hurley rink, but to my right another door, thick as a trunk and heavy with hardwood. It stood wide open and I walked through, straight into a living room parlour large enough to hold thirty guests. A painting ten feet wide hung above the divan; foxes, horses and hounds, hides all ruddy in an autumn sunset, ran along the forest eaves, lusting after hart and hind. Long rugs wrapped the redstained floor of wood; most were white & woolen but one was golden-maned with horsehair and fine-matted along its length. A colossal Kachelofen (tile-stove) rose from ground to ceiling on my right, and spanned the bredth of the wall. Cast iron doors of sundry size opened from its center, and its edges fell low into seats, all made of tile, one looming structure. One could sit along the tile benches to keep warm. The hearth section was made of tawny rough-hewn stone, but the tile seats were smooth as marble, hotwarm to touch. A further passage led off the parlour to the kitchen where a woman stood cooking along a long counter. She turned and looked at me where I stood in her kitchen. Seeing another door off the kitchen, I quickly spoke to her, pointing to the door, “Entschuldigen Sie mir bitte, darf ich hier mal durch?” “Excuse me please, may I go through this way?” She answered in German: “Gehen Sie am besten dadurch wieder hinaus. Eigentlich sollten Sie nicht hier sein, wissen Sie.” (“Go back out through it, that would be best. Actually you shouldn’t be here, you know.”) I nod to her apologetically, then dash out through the door, ascending back up to the Bierhalle.

II. The Runenstammtisch, the Four Corners of the Earth, Palm-Carving, and Ystvir the 'Loyalty Rune'

Hard on the heals of the previous dream, I now dreamt I met with German speakers in Wisconsin for converse in that language. My German Conversation Table colleagues had decided to meet outside on picnic benches along a lake. Stammtisch normally takes place in the Paul Bunyan Room across from Stiftskeller in Memorial Union, but this time we met in a somewhat mythical Tenney Park, high on a hill, ranged along a long long table. When I came there, I saw that all the members were carving insignia into one another’s palms, and the markings left were clearly runes, all straight angled and red with drying blood. The blade went round, and each new blade-wielder cut a rune into his neighbour’s palm, depending on which rune the World Chart chose for that person. This Chart, showing the Four Corners and Four Winds of Earth, went round with the blade, and came at last to my partner, a woman named Jo. She turned the chart round and round, it seemed to spin on an unseen axis, and it burst open in the air into a life-size realm, huge enough to walk inside. Soon it was beneath me and I was hovering over another world like a child hovers over a hand-held mirror beneath its chin, pretending the sky is beneath your feet. I let my gaze fall inside this expanding surface, and I hover-floated over the Earth from end to end. As I looked, I spied a great herd of bison grinding their feet into the dirt along the edge of he Pacific Ocean, making ready for a charge in one rumble east over the American Continent. Sky-high dust rose on the Great Plains, and thunder filled the air. Jo explained that the Native Americans had seen this apparition of might charge at them several times in their history, when the Buffalos first came to them from another world, and made a sound like the Thunderbird folding the world inside out with its wings. I looked then east over the Atlantic to the old North of the Occident, and I saw a red dragon flying over the northern tips of Scandinavia, swooping down upon Iceland, Faroes, Denmark, Germany, Scotland. The dragon stopped over Scotland, and the Chart spun round and round, counterclockwise against a clockwise spinning ring of letters, that wheeling opposite another ring of spinning letters, and that opposite another counter-spinning. When all wheels stopped their whirling, the adjacent letters printed a word across the land of Scotland - the word Ystvir - and the Ystvir rune (unknown to me) stood drawn next to its designation. I was very curious about the etymology and authenticity of this word, and doubted the 'random spinning' of the Chart. How do you know this is an authentic historical word? I asked Jo. She told me that Ystvir was the most ancient Germanic word for ‘Loyalty’, that I could look it up myself (I've yet to research its true meaning) and that this was the rune that the Fates had chosen to be carved into my palm and have me own up to. When I saw the blade she wielded, I told her I would not have that bloody knife cut me, but she must find a clean one, unused and razor sharp. “You don’t want it?” she asked. “I don’t want the bloody blade that’s carved all the others’ hands. You must find for me my own blade, an edge to be used upon me and me alone.” I fished in my own bags and (ironically given my former dream) drew out my Swiss Army knife, handing it to Jo. She took it and with it carved the Ystvir rune into my palm. I do not remember the shape of the actual rune, and (thankfully) found nothing carved into my palm when I woke later. Still it is curious; loyalty is not a virtue I've made very central to daily aspects of my life. I've been loyal to my closest friends and core vision since childhood, but that loyalty (or perception thereof) has meant treachery toward those who seem to defy the former. I've not been very loyal to other things that have come my way and which (in due course) seemed to lead me astray from my former convictions. But as it is for many visionaries, with greater integration of life purpose comes greater loyalty. I hoped it was a sign for me, a sign of broader, integrated loyalty to come.

Upon further reflection, I realise that Germanic dragons and Sioux bison carry a resonance of the same thing: the Apocalypse and the return to Eden's wealth. Dragons herald strife and change, and they hoard the wealth of the world that the humans try to win or keep from them. They also try to keep us out of Eden, while yet embodying fertility, as snakes do in most folk traditions. Bison provide and trample down, herd gently in Eden, or thunder over the wrack and ruin of the diseased Plains, ushering hard weathers and a sweeping Thunderbird. After they charge, a renewed earth can be born. If Ystvir means in Norse what I now think it might (were it an actual compound) - 'The Man Standing Outermost' - then it may be that my looking upon the globe from its edges and rims is of deep significance. I'm on the outside looking down and in. I wish to dart in and involve myself, but am still trying to guage where my place is. The fact that the Ystvir rune appeared on the Earth-Chart over the North Atlantic seemed only natural, given the lines of continuity already traced through my life, such as they exist.

Ystvir, in my sleephazy memory of waking life, could stand in for an actual rune of similar name: Yngvi. Let's follow that track a moment. Yngvarr is a Swedish Viking name, and the historical Yngvarr was a world-traveller. It's in some way built off the well-known god-name, Yngvi, which is ALSO the name of a rune - the rune for the -NG- sound - and is named for the Germanic god *Ingwaz (Norse Yngvi ). Ingwaz is a god of physical fruitfulness and prosperity. But naught to do with loyalty. Yngvarr ( 'Guardian of Yngvi') on the other hand.... ? Perhaps Yngvarr is meant to pun with Ystvir. But I've only guesses. The gods named most loyal/trustworthy are Tiwaz (Týr) and Thunar (Thórr).

Taking a more lexically literal approach, I note that Yst in Norse-Icelandic means 'outermost', and -vir is man or warrior or protector. 'Outermost man'? 'Far-out dude'? Then there is ysta, to curdle milk, make cheese.(!) Dream etymologies rarely pan out....

III. The Paranormal Party

In a third dream sequence, all these fat Danish men gorged on herring, rye bread, butter, sausage, pastry and tortes, and walked around me ten feet high. They drank strong ale and ate strong food all night. Some were thin and sinewy, with long sinewy strength and reach. Many others had bellies so large they had to stick to the couches because they could barely move, napping after every feed. I was tired myself, hadn’t slept much the night before, and slept most of the living day after the party on the couch next to some snoring Danes. The following night, the party continued, and Swedes were invited in as well, filling the second night with Gothland spells and witchery. The dream was all comic light and fun lusty Danes, and suddenly the mood shifts, and shadows wing across the room. Light and darkness shift back and forth. Lights in the rooms start switching on and off, off and on, and sudden darkness or light overtook us. I ran then to check my e-mail, and received a note from S.S. with the heading: PARANORMAL ACTIVITY ALERT. “Note: Paranomral activity will be far higher than usual from Thursday through Saturday night. Partiers beware.” And the party was wyrded out. The lightbulbs seemed to burn out one by one, even as people fell into sleeping stupors one after another. The next morning, I woke at work to find that it was my client's house in which all the partying had taken place. She was bewildered as to why the living room light didn’t work and asked me why not. “What can you expect after partying all night the way you did?” I throw at her teasingly.

Dreamt 15 April 2011

IV. The Four Poles and and the North Pole Dog

In this fourth cosmographic dream, I picked up a handheld map of the Earth. As I looked, the image grew more photographic than symbolic. The longer I stared, the bigger the map grew, until I was hover-floating over it, the real thing itself, straining my eyes to see all its edges, which wrapped under themselves like a fold of paper. Its outer boundaries formed a walkable Rim, a curving precipice one could lean over and peek under to catch the underside of the Ovalglobe. Between all its rims swirled a great ocean with no landmasses to be seen so far I could tell. As my vision widened, so did the Earth itself. I swooped in closer to Four Poles – North, South, East, West. The globe was stretched between four ends, and the wind whirled and gyred from each one. A long Ice Bridge connected all four poles. I set my feet down on the east-rim of this Earth and began walking upward (northward) on the Ice Bridge until I got within eye-sight of the North Pole. I came at it from a point that would have been south of the Bering Sea, and there I stopped short. At the edge of my vision I saw leaping toward me a rollicking Siberian Husky. He came in big trundling bounds, almost seeming to roll as he hurtled over his feet. I stood on a point at the edge of the Northern Ice, looking north, looking straight at him. To my left (West) eddied open ocean. When the dog was halfway between me and the Pole, I saw that it was Kodiak, the dog I had grown up with and so mirrored in mood and habit. He legged the final leg and bowled me over in a big forepaw leap off his hind legs, launched by a fervor of recognition and joy, landing with his armpits square on my chest and his paws at my ears. I reeled backward with his happy weight on me, torqueing my body to one side before we hit ground and rolled and rolled in a dog-man bundle over the expanse of ice.

Claustrogyny

2011-04-08T14:26:00.000-07:00

Claustrogyny

In Two-thousand-three,
early in Spring,
I had a dream.
I guested at the house
of a hoary woman.
My closest friends followed me there.
She lodged us in a loft,
high-vaulted, windowless.
In the dark above, the rafters ranged unseen;
the floor planks ran under cover of dark.
It smelt of hay and musty dust.
Dry as a bone, but wet on the ends.
Wide wooden columns reached up to the vault, lost in shadow.
Surroundng each pillar, and piled in each corner,
lay half discernable urns and bins,
wooden chests, stacks of hair,
matted and manged.

Thick stuck under heavy covers, she bedded us down on the floor.
Quick as a spider, the spindly crone snuffed out the lights.
She spun her threads.
Wire-wool blankets she spread on the walls. The air hung stuck on the pricks of stubble.
Her silkworm body slipped away in a crack; her white withers sank away in the black.
Gone, O Yes.
Instead of sleep, I began to snoop, what fun.
I ransacked the boxes and bins, cramming fat sacks with handfuls of grime.
With my hands I sliced the viscous air, squeezing the flesh of dust.
I stuffed the sacks as fast as I could, bulging with bird-bones and clodded dung.

With a twist of anger, she reeled around.
Her hands fell like flails, gripping the sacks, dumping the dust and thrashing the chaff.
She vanished with a whish and vampish whisk.
Then sudden return.
Four steps she took, four deadfalling notes descending.
Dank dour power.
With one fast push, she packed a pillow flush in the door.

I crouched and creeped, slunk over friends asleep in the dark.
I heard long pauses between their heaves, their slow lungs lifting their coma chests.
I fingered and felt the flow of the walls, their nooks and nicks, the ungrovelled grooves.
I groped onto hinges, long-line creases, the unseen frame of a door.
In a fit of defiance, I pushed on the wood.
The wall swung open,
the swinging doors of a mammoth mow.
I yanked at the bins, the boxes and bones.
I hurled in haste, heaving in handfuls.
Lifted tables and dressers, desks and chairs - crashed them on tarmac below.
They smacked and splintered far down hard. The wind blew eddies in the sunlit grit.

With troll-steps of wroth, she strode straight back.
My friends rubbed their eyes in the blinding light.
Get out! I bellowed like a billow of wind.
Whirring, a helicopter hovered at the doors. Ropeladders fell for my wobbly friends.
I stayed back, stalking.
In all her height she stood still, hard by a pillar.
I walked behind her, wrapped her,
folded her flanks,
fondled her silken belly,
blew into her ear.
Her head sank back, her ice-eyes shut.
Her anger went out in a pang of pain,
her silkwarm skin turned to snow and stone.

Door Knobs, Tires and Tobacco Tea (with Herbs!)

2011-02-16T10:36:00.000-08:00

I’ve been tampering with door knobs, especially the kind that pull off when you use them, and the kind that don't shut neighbours' rattly bang-bang doors. I've also been swapping tires off different bicycles to make one straight bike. The front is almost level with the back, almost. Sponges in door cracks are useful to hold doors still, but being sneaky with sponges makes neighbours suspicious. Frankly, I find people who try to recycle their wet shirts and half-eaten tomatoes in the recycling bin suspicious.

Otherwise I'm succumbing to a madness for dandelion & chicory root/leaf teas - 'wortbrews': They are my darlings. I got to mingling coffy & tobacco leaves with the dandy in an iron steeper today. It's pungent, heady, headswimmy & tasty (with lots (LOTS) of pure cream). For calories, am slurping in a deal of leek & tater cream-soup, biting on Italian red-wine salamis, red taters, February crabapples, honey, butter, ciabatta, high calorie ale (imperial), dandelion, broccoli, broccoli sprouts, salmon, sardines, and ingesting dark cacao cakes with runny cacao centers.

Halo Eve

2011-02-08T15:50:00.000-08:00

Snowpaced home,
tingleblissed and snowlambsoled,
shiversouled,
after bell-rain tings,
scents and frankincense,
winegrails and waferflesh,
halos and hallows of Chrissamass mass

{25-26 December 2010}

House of Nations

2011-02-08T15:49:00.000-08:00

Dreamt today [8 January 2011] I climbed thru hatches in a tower, multi-level, archival, housing an ongoing history of all the world’s peoples. Spent hours in the 'Jews Room' with Dad, Mom & Rachel, as Sara peeked over from Arab Corridor. A Christian Jew (folkdancer I know) spoke of Jewish history, while friend Alan-Hugo exchanged good legs with a crippled Jew, before I spiraled north up a stairway into Britain.

Feeling along the floorboards, I found a ribbon-wrapped letter, sealed with a red heart—signed from me. The lady recipient had saved it from centuries ago, came & kissed me for hours; the same thing happened in a special Scottish ‘wing’- the young girl said Robin (Burns) had died & left her along the way. Saying goodbye, my letter sealed, I walked into a land of mountains & Aryan tribes, where an Indus-Iranian woman made my wedding with invites from Carpathians to Himalayas. The entire dream played to the tune & faint whisper of Robert Burns’ song, _The Wren’s Nest_ :

The Robin to the Wren’s nest
Cam keekin’ in, cam keekin’ in;
O weel’s me on your auld pow,
Wad ye be in, wad ye be in?
Thou’s ne’er get leave to lie without,
And I within, and I within,
Sae lang’s I hae an auld clout
To rowe ye in, to rowe ye in.

{Translation}
The Robin to the Wren's nest
Came peekin in, came peekin in;
I'm blessed by your old noggin,
You want inside? You want inside?
You'll never get leave to lie outside,
While I inside, while I inside --
So long's I have an old cloth
To swaddle you in, to swaddle you in

The tail end of the dream featured Alan-Hugo, now one foot tall, hobbling on the crippled legs he'd willingly taken off the Jew, a man named Simon. Alan, barely able to walk, was his old, bold, joking self. Simon suddenly appeared, overjoyed to see him. The two reclined along a low table, laughing, telling stories, both so happy, their eyes went red with tears. I sat and watched them both, amazed, my face wet. Neither one remembered what deformity or pain meant.

People on the Bus Tell You How to Be Healthy :-/

2011-02-08T15:31:00.000-08:00

I overheard something very similar to the following conversation while taking the 10pm 3Bus on February 7th, 2011.

Participants:

--Single mother

--Two male students

Mother: Hey. Just came from Knuckleheads. They didn't have any.

Student: Yeah you can't beat those. When I want my tobacco fix, I always go for __________.

Mother: Yeah def. They've been sayin smoking it isn't good for you, but cigs are just as bad, pot the same. It don' matter.

Student: Shhhhhh, Everything's bad for you. Taco Bell just recalled a bunch of lettuce! D'you hear that? Yeah.

Mother: Like my kid. He's been havin some kinda skin issue. I just give him ___________ , clears him right up, but it's not supposed to be good for'im.

Student: [laughing] That is some bad stuff! Intense. He's like 1? It's helpin tho, I bet, RIGHT?

Mother: Heck yeah.

Student: Man, babies are craaaazy!

Mother: Yeah, tough lid'l guy.

Student: Wshooooo. Wow, gettin hungry. Can't wait till class tomorrow, you? I love it when Mr ________ brings a sh_t-load of donuts or cupcakes. Gives me enough punch for the day.

Mother: Y'got that right. And what about cookies? Cookies will make ANYONE happy.

Student: Sh_t yeah! I skip breakfast just for his class. Ts'mazin he brings all that sh_t.

Mother: SOMEONE's gotta take care of us!

Student: People are nice !!

Water Dreams IV and V

2011-02-08T15:27:00.000-08:00

Water Dream IV, Monona Swamp Zona

On January 29th, 2011, I dreamt I descended a steep park pathway that used to be Monona Path next to the newish Convention Center. It was wet dirt, slowly slicking with rising lakemud. The path led to a green bottom of shimmery ooze, wet grass, and sinking algae. The poorest people in Madison, many of Hispanic, African or south Asian heritage, were playing and frolicking in the mud, sometimes getting stuck or diving under, some laughing, some looking worried, and a few of them pulling themselves onto the wet grass for football kick or toss in the park. Many people were swimming, nay crawling, far out inside the lake itself, which swoll with waves of mud broken by rippling rivers of water on top of the brown. When I myself got to this lakeshore park, I suddenly sank to my hips, then swim-crawled, clambered toward higher ground to the North.

Water Dream V, The Wave-Swamped Clique-Isles of Mendota

Further North was Lake Mendota. It looked like a colossal indoor swimming pool. The embankments were made of steel, glass and cement. No trees or grass grew along the shores. It had a raw beauty, if only for its sheer expanse of water. The far north banks could vaguely be sighted, where people were sitting, dangling their feet into the lake as if it were a manmade basin. No one seemed to have any cars or boats close to the water. They were all afoot, or already out on the lake. I stood on the Union side (south), had a full view of all ends of the water. I walked along this waterfront westward, seeing islands floating like rafts, rocking on the waves. Hordes of people clustered on each island. Some isles rocked, swayed but were anchored, a little wave-washed. Others freefloated across the water, sometimes partially capsizing or flooding.

I swam out. Pulled my body up onto one island raft after another, but found each one too crowded, and the people only stared into nothingness, or looked down, or yelled into the air at no one and no thing in particular. Every time I came to a water-island, I jumped off back to sea, seeing I didn't fit on or in. On some isle-rafts stood exclusively students. Other rafts had hipsters or geeks or other (for me) cosmetic, xenophobic, ephemeral cliques which nonetheless strictly floated on one bit of rock or another and only on that one. Shorewood Village had the grandest isle, but it was ringed round with a high-voltage fence! I went to the far west shore then, saw this huge craggy thing out in the water, like a mountain rising up from the shore so steep you couldn't hope to climb it. The top looked like a glass-like obsidian top to topple off. I swam round to its lower access point, climbed on, then began slipping down toward the water no matter which end of it I walked on. I finally made a leap for shore, left Lake Anti-Social and Lake Mud, left BOTH behind.

Water Dreams I, II and III

2011-01-24T08:51:00.001-08:00

Nearly every dream I've dreamt in the past forty days has featured water.

I am still in the process of writing out this dream sequence and will add in Water Dream III over the course of the next few days.

Water Dream I: The Brackish Lake and the Tongue-Protruders

In late December of 2010, I dreamt I was trying to rehouse myself in a Madison co-op and that I'd decided to membership my dad along with me. He came all the way from Michigan to have a look. He and I stood on one side of a brackish summer-hot lake, a weedier, fishier version of Lake Mendota in the summer than even that lake often is. We gazed off a dock and looked to an opposite shore where a co-op house stood. I decided to try swimming in the water, not so much decided as felt lured and lulled in by the currents. The brackish lake began to move and lurch, ebb and flow, swell up toward me, then recede with a cloud of weed-hair and slimy fish copying the currents. I dove in and felt my body channeled forward, then ripple back as a mop-head of lake life surged between my outstretched hairs, fingers and feet. I felt the long bodies of fish slip between my hands and fingers, then shot to the surface with a long catch in my left hand. I brandished the fish like a king, riding with it to shore, the opposite shore, waving it at my incomprehending fellows before arcing it back into the air to fall adown back in the lake. Dad resurfaced too right at the co-op, perhaps having driven around in his car. We both membershipped there, enjoying the sights along the pier, trying to make conversation and find suitable food, before we were informed we ought to stay after supper for the 'Buddhist Meditation Workshop'. What ruined the experience for me (I dared not look at Dad) was how the residents kept sitting in fixed yoga positions while sticking out their tongues. In fact, some of them looked like statues, immovable, until you walked by a yoga human - then out came the tongue at you. It was as if one could not ought not take their world seriously, nor would they, and we left.

Water Dream II : The Land of the Whole, the Barn of Netherlandic Bulls, the Anglo-Saxon-Frisian Swim Retinue, the Celtic Queen and the River of Copper Clay, and the Swedish Bards

This compound dream I dreamt on the 13th of January in 2011.

The Land of the Whole

I left my Wisconsin home on a permanent holiday in a land to the East and the Dawn, and I decided to walk the distance. My father's whole clan was there, and we met in the early 19th century house of my father's parents, once located in central Ohio. But as I walked, I was no longer in Ohio, but in Michigan; not in Michigan, but in Britain; not in Britain, but in Ireland; not in any one of them, but in all of them at once. Boundaries. Boundaries overstepped, passed over, gone and intermerged. It wasn't earth, it wasn't heaven, it was earth-heaven, boundless. Rivers flowed to outer oceans leading to outer lands to outseas to outlands, to waterpaths to further lands, and nought wheeled back to the beginning, but each took up their old theme, discarding nothing of the past, embracing all that was to come. There was no cliché, all was rooted but unconventional, and not near post-Modern or surreal (unfitting word for reality) in the least. Paradise had reclaimed the stretches of that ground - and I was there. Suddenly, I was walking down a reborn version of Patterson, Norris and Bowens Mills (?) roads, but the colours seemed more essential and primary, like a painting, but real not representational, like walking inside the animated (literally 'enlivened') film of Watership Down, or C. S. Lewis' vision of Herefordshire in the painting which hung in his childhood nursery (see Brian Sibley's Shadowlands: The True Story of C. S. Lewis and Joy Davidman.) Light shone in one even gold, not sourced in one horizon or sun, but was one whole-world radiance, soft and golden. Each tree, stone, house or fence was more substantive, less permeable, less divisible, less mutable. The wind couldn't grab the leaves when it brushed through, nor did it barely tickle my ears, but sang songs as it blew instead. My footfalls were not self-protective, nor was anything self-preoccupied, for each thing seemed wise enough to know how to shun self-destruction. Pain and discomfort, those life-preserving cues, weren't needed. No hurt was given or exchanged, and the heart of earth's folly - 'doing only what one wants and never getting what one wants' had no place. One wouldn't think to breathe or hold one's breath except out of awe - nothing was out of need. I was holding my breath, I think, and would not have remembered for how long. The sequences of life weren't anticipation for nourishment or comfort, or fear of pain, but rather an ongoing sense of being lost in wonder at the present moment, a wonder that grew with each step, tracing pathways whose paces never recircled or recycled. Newness knew no end or boundary, and soon I was weeping, as if tears fueled my muscles and energy and motivation like a precious oil. All existed for existence's sake. I was sundered from nothing, soul and body were of one matter, and all of my distinct identity and person remained intact, as did that of every tree and stone.

I've given you a description of it, not of the movement and flow of the experience itself - and that was the experience I had when I dreamt it, one I do not know how to write down. I've made a beginning, a description, do not know how further to convince you of the reality of that vision, for no one who has not walked that land, or seen at least its far-off dim boundaries, the vast rumour of things that cannot be but last, will be convinced it is a real life-on-earth rather than a state of mind. Inside the mind, the cut-off mind, distrustful of the unchartable real, the possessor (victim) is trapped. There where I lived for a time while asleep, you cannot be trapped. You can never more be trapped, jailed inside a single thought derived from an infinite regression of cause-effect mindless processes, because that world never was. Regressive infinity is the Modern's never-never-land, an infinite personless material past that never reaches the present nor deigns to brave the future. That jailed world never was. Never was it anywhere, except in confinement and delusional despair, the only surreal thing one may sip. The experience I had matches in mood and reference point the latter chapters of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader when Reepicheep sees the Beginning of the End of the World, walks the Wonders of the Last Sea, passes to the Very End of the World, the least thing of anything that ever was which was like an End of anything at all.

The Barn of Netherlandic Bulls

Dreams are as nuanced, boundaried and multi-leveled as real life: I came out of the Paradise sequence with my own two feet still planted in the immature soil of my waking earth. I walked past the boundaries, liminal though they may be, of that Eden’s land, and came to a countryside of broad green pastures, grown and fat for any cattle, udderswollen with grassbitten milk, secretion created in springseeded excrescences. A barn stood wide and high before me, bloodred and whitestained with a starspangled hexagram. Dutch cattle swelled its haychamber rooved under heavy woodbeams, walled in timber-pillared walls, heaven-reaching, earthbound, woodmade. Trees hewn to house food and life and milk, containing peril of horns and spearsteers. I saw them heave their huge necks, muscles of mating anger, forever anger-lusting, rearing at me from behind the pillars. I passed between the Hexagram Barn and a fence-fold, cattle enfolded on both sides, as I walked over the grass, green with grasscream milk not yet in the udders. And fear pushed out my chest as I breathed for dear life. I paused outside of paradise as a young bull, sharphorned, came headbutting and mate-eager toward his masculate opponent, a Nathan fresh from Eden. He made a deep bow with his horns, shot his power into rippled withers, and heaved the horns toward my crotch as he ran at me, enraged by Dutch blood and Dutch milk. His butting run met my fate-bound unfoundering leap, as I fled my most feared animal the bullhorned hungry one, and swung my body up onto the high fence beam of the fold, escaping his bloodspears, and climbed in desperation along the fence above more bulls below me in the humble corral in which they were penned and waiting. A flock of bulls, ladyless, were horny there, after the most literal fashion, and I shouldershot my weight by force of hip and arm over to a chickenwire shed amidmost the fold. Swine were held within, and I climbed overtop them, looking out over the mud and fence range in which the hooved cattle scratched the ground. Then a sudden change: a retinue of strawheaded ‘Dutch’ farmhands poured into the fold, driving the coward cattle in all directions, and looked up at me. Their leader, a wise wizened Netherlandic farmer, bade me come down and serve him and his farm, join his band of sunworkers and meadswillers. I came down, unafraid of the cattle, as the men had overwhelmed the animals with their own presence. He told me to butt toward the bulls, go at them with my own 'horns', never run away, and they would draw back in their fear before they could incite my own. I got in the queue, last of all, intent to follow them and learn from them, as the head farmer led us out into the fields for the haymaking. Foaming cider, honeycakes, apples, rosemary salad, rabbit pasties and bluejay pies with oat and barleymeal filled our gullets at noon in noonsun as we swinked and sweated hard in sunbliss, napping at high noon, joined to lassies with fingers allknowing the cow-udders and allkeeping the lads in warm company. As I worked on, I saw that my ‘Dutchmen’ of Michigan were Anglo-Frisian-Saxons, the early Germanic takers of east Britannia, that I formed their hindmost retinue and must yet be proved and tested. We drove and fed and milked our cattle along the sedge-rich rivers of lowland England, until we left off cattle driving and started on water sports, unbanking our boats into the slow broad rivers of low Angleland and saw the riverbottoms bleed copperred as we rowed our way over their course to Welshland. This border with fallen Druids mingled the Anglish and Welsh roots, and our riversports leader, a woman, approached her Celto-English comitatus, her Angles, as their leader in the sport of bodily daring.

The Anglo-Saxon-Frisian Swim Retinue, the Celtic Queen and the River of Copper Clay

She had full but short dark hair that came to the round tops of her white shoulders, and her skin glowed applered on her chalk cheeks, her eyes deepset under dark brows. All fell silent and action-eager at her words, as she gestured us to look upon the copper clay banks of a fast river, shallow but rapid. We slid off the claycleaving banks into the waters, and followed her wherever she wished us to go. I’d joined the Anglo-Frisian-Saxon swim team, and there was no turning back, nor would we ever again be Lowlanders, whether Dutch or Danish, of the lost continent to the east under our new Welsh and foreign guide. I quickly made friends of my comitatus, who were forthright in their trust and speech, but loved pictures and riddles to drive a point. They bound their lives under oath with my own, had no fear of death or life, whether plucking apples for drink fit for British queens, fermenting honeycomb drippings for Offa, or lying lifeless pierced beyond healing by hornspeared bulls. Our boatleader told us we would spend the next two days skin-to-water, out of boat, afloat, aswim or under water, would come through or be saved by our mates, would live or die in the attempt. She says it is our choice to save our friends from drowning or cramping, that truest friends will win the day. Two days in water? I think to myself. My skin, anyone’s skin, will fall off, I tell myself, and I sadly climb the river banks, too ashamed to look back, and walk away from my company. “I don’t think I can straight swim for more than an hour” I tell myself. When I was on the margins of their sight, I stopped and stood still, then turned back to face them, filled with wonder and sadness. “No, I will go back”, I tell myself. I walk back to them, catching the Saxon second in command, a snooty man who helps our Welsh lady teach us. I say to him I wish to rejoin my retinue, devote my life to them, come life or death. This Saxon is dressed like a Modern man, stylish and trendy, seems to care nothing for the people or ways he heads up. He jerks his head toward her, signing to me to take up my cause with her. I do so, and she gives a subtle smile, looks away, calls my name, says I’m to stand backmost of the men, ready to leap into water. It is at this moment that one of my comrades whispers to me: “It’s not two days straight submerged in water without relief – it’s two days’ worth of water ordeals, in and out of water!” “Oh!” I think to myself, somewhat relieved. The first ordeal is one of speed and vigour, and we are told to swim against the current from a point downstream to a cliffbordered shoreline upstream. One by one, my men make the swim, swimming as swift as their bodies will push them. Those waiting on the shore time the swimmers by tapping the seconds with their bare feet. When it’s my turn, I go crashing against the current like a seal, get to the shore cheered on by my friends, out of breath, who are yelling and gasping my name saying funny things like “You’re fast! You’re one quick dude!”

The Swedish Bards

At this point, we take a brief break from our water tests to soak in entertainment from our ancestors, a small band of elderly Swedish singers and strummers who make music for us, rather after the fashion of the music and poetry chanted by Hróðgar’s Danes or Swedish guests in his Baltic island hall when the Angles and Northmen exchanged peacewives and peacetales in their conflict over land. They single me out as someone who can communicate with these archaic bards, and send me to their booths and smörgåsbords to express the devotion and heartfelt attention from the Angles, Frisians, Saxons and Jutes. I notice that the Swedish servers are decked in modern dress, serving paté, potato cakes, cognac, creamed herring and rye crackers! Many of them are elderly, saying they’d abandoned their depressing if stylish nursing homes for the chance to utter legend and music for their southern siblings. I try speaking Swedish to them for awhile, and they show me a musical manuscript from which they are about to sing. It is quite old, if anachronistic, with origins in the 16th century. As the nyckelharpa strums, I wake up.

Water Dream III:

The Waterfall that Fell out of Heaven
On the 20th of January, 2011, I dreamt I picked my path toward my sister's Westcoast home, having abandoned my parents' cartrip to the same destination. Mom and Dad came by car, and I felt my way along the stones of the Pacific Northwest Coast, with a view to open ocean and the cliff-falling shore. I saw a tall house in the distance, heavily supported with pillars and vertical beams, fair with a porch facing the open sea. I and my parents weren't just visiting, but moving in with my sister (Rachel), having lost houses or lands in our own homely parts of the country. I found the footjourney very slippery, and soon was crawling on hands and feet, pulling myself up by handgripped stone, slipslidey with green moss. I zigzagged, often had to trek athwart my course along mossy ridges, which fell too steeply to descend until a path could be found. I at long last came to a cave open on two ends, the sealight pouring through from the opposite side, and I chose it as the quickest surest way to my sister's house. I clutched on for dear life in the ascent to the cave, almost slipping onrushing down several times, and felt my hands near bloody on the sharp white stone forming the insides of the cave. I hoisted my body up inside, and climbed further in, which entailed moving upward as well as inward until I reached the light at the further end. There at its seaward opening the orifice opened downwards, with a descent and view to the sea. I saw Rachel's large house below, and clambered safely down. As I approached, I saw the seas shadowy and turbid, morbid and dark, restless under some nameless stirring. As dusk came on, the washing waves went black until dawn, when a strange twilight greylight grew over the ocean. I looked up to the heaven over the sea, and saw a cataract pelt down onto the entire width of the sea, the whole length of my vision from south to north, the falling of rain from some high cloud to high to see, and the downpour fell so hard it was a great Niagara, tinged with clouded fire on the perimeters, as if a red sun rose behind the occluding waterfall. The rush of waters roared through the distance, and I saw the shores seem to rock and sway under the rising waters surging in a giant sea-tub, a bathtub of all the seas of earth, rising, rising. I was on the porch, ran inside to find my family. The corridors and rooms were swimming in a river, ankle-deep, then rising to my hips by the time I found my mother. She told me we needed to get to the other side of the Central Hallway of this house, then we'd come out into the highest room in the house. I sloshed into this corridor, which to my surprise was shaped like a cylinder, curved on all surfaces, narrow and small, and filling rapidly with water. I swam through the hallway behind my mother as the water came within inches of the roof. She pulled me out and through around the bend into the next room before the water trapped me inside.

Slacktrack

2010-12-16T21:51:00.001-08:00

I dreamed I watched a sweating stallion pass by in twilight, while a voice narrated the horse's thoughts. The huge beast was led away to be put down in the deep woods by Iron Age riders. I looked at him from a side sky-window, like I were in a slow-moving train or cart. The voice spoke in rhythm with the horse's head and hooves, narrating the following poem which I furiously scribbled as I woke:

He knew by their gait it led away,
stolen from stall, slackened slow
His hoof-fall fell quiet.
He smelt on their hands the sweat of a fall
He felt in the wind the breath of a stop
He heard the train down a lifelong rail,
on the tracks of unknown days,
the way he wondered why clop.
Horseheaving breath cooled him around
He nosed the rime-sighs of night
under heft of heavy riders.
Light smouldered on the edges drawn
within the Chart of Days
inside the twilight hall
where they danced
a horse trance,
men and ladies,
hands clasped at last
in the late dew
of a late fall

[22 November 2010 anno Domini]

Nutrition in the Darkness

2010-12-07T09:27:00.000-08:00

On November 2nd, I dreamt. Found a berry-hedge along a wood-eaves in a land which mingled Wisconsin, Michigan and Britain. Walking in the twilight, I gorged on big dark round berries: wild blueberries, black cherries, bramble(black)berries, wild grapes and edible black-nightshade berries. Each pluck or taste made a bug bite my finger (no itch or pain) or a lapdog-sized boar run at me, unharming. Above me, on a woodland knoll, stood a firelit Gothic cathedral casting candlebeams down the woodslope from its glade. Groping in the darkness next to the hedge, I found my leather journal, halfdrunk wine-flask, and my Swiss army knife. The sword, the book, and the bottle - the symbols (with harp) of personal liberty in Celtic Catholic poverty.

Yulespell

2010-12-02T18:55:00.000-08:00

Cold wind, leather, hot wind, smoke, ironwood, chillflame, oak. Songfrost, singe, lullcavern, wake, hotglad glee-bite ache. Yulespell, bard, quiltburrow, Lombard. Clothspell, sea-rime, fire-Goth, brine. Visigoth, Vendula, Vandal, wine

Red Bees Bleed a City

2010-12-01T09:25:00.000-08:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/30/nyregion/30bigcity.html?_r=2&src=me&ref=homepage

Six Sequences of Shifting

2010-10-04T10:14:00.000-07:00

I had a six-sequence dream: In the first bit, paying rent was impossible, because all tenants' rent money came through as counterfeit or drawn from fictitious banks. Secondly, some builders were demolishing a room directly over mine, insecuring my ceiling. The workers were mafia. In the third sequence, we looked for hidden rooms in attic, cellar and walls(no luck). Fourthly, my former prophet housemate carved figures in the ground and pavement of birds flying away. In the sixth sequence, my Appalachian grandfather looked for jobs in Ireland, while I compared his accent to the employment officers'. Lastly, my Irish friend's house was named in a vocal chant: "A place of forgotten & timeless love and hate".

In sum: (1) can't pay rent (since all money is counterfeit). (2) mafia builders demolish room above mine,destroying my room. (3) I look for hide-out room space behind walls, underground or in attics. (4) a prophet carves figures of fugitive birds all over the ground (5) my Appalachian grandfather is unemployed, looks for work in a poor country (Ireland),feels a cultural bond with them. (6) the home of a close Irish friend is sung out as "a place of timeless and forgotten love and hate."

Noon near Noon Road, nearly nicking my head

2010-06-26T20:02:00.000-07:00

I had a dream I was searching for a road called Noon Rd. The time was *noon*, and I saw two roads forking, both ascending upwards with steps, high hedges bordering the left choice. I chose the right-hand road, which turned out to be under construction. I ducked under some scaffolding & turned back as a worker yelled at ...me: "*Noon* Road's on the left! Hey - Watch your noon!" [don't clock your head!]

Nathan: Weirdly, I think a memory of Chief Noonday trails at Yankee Springs in Michigan ties somehow into this dream. The way under construction points to the immature America - the hedges point to Britain. Still I hang on....

Hope Aurora Martinson: hvilken vei var riktig?

Susanne Radmann: the right-hand road is not an option which is ready yet. however, your full commitment is asked for, now. no matter what position you take, you have to do it (noon - either way spells noon). don't give yourself a headache over it - you know the answer already. so, go lightly and in the light of your decision.

Mikaela Lundh Baum: What a very symbolic but still clear dream, interesting!

Nathan: Yes, it is the hour (Noon), the open road (Noon), the very top of my head is struck by...Noon. Can't make it midnight or morning....

Nathan: Hope, jeg tror begge veier var 'riktige', men den ene var ikke ennå bygd og ferdferdig. Kanskje etter at jeg er helt oppe på den venstre gata får jeg gå ned på den høyre. Kanskje FORENES de to veiene etter at jeg har hatt mot å velge veien mellom hekkene. Jeg håper at Håpe skal finne og omfatte meg på veien. Kanskje du óg trenger den gangstien vi skal finne.

Shunners left behind

2010-06-06T17:46:00.000-07:00

Black turm-Oil white-washed by In-humans as In-nocent sink where we can't. Love-ly's unreached. O Shun, and See when you're drowning. The Eve of Eden - when Woman says: Enough! Man-hell sits behind. Man-hole alone in your dark.

Dream of the Upsurging Polish Clock-Tower and the Waterfall Cliff-face upon the Polish Catholic Court

2010-06-03T14:44:00.001-07:00

Dreamt that I and my family (both sisters, Egyptian brother in-law, my mother/father) were visiting Poland. Accompanying me was a female companion, herself from Poland.

We approached a very wealthy estate. Gazed at its green and walled court centered around a straight and stern tower, very high. I began crooning back my head to see its top. I kept bending backward from a 'tourist viewpoint' (a walled-in look-out near benches), straining to see up the tower, whose height grew and shape surged sheer. The bulk of its height bore down forward from the clouds, as my eyes shot up its stone like camera eyes. I felt I was staring up a colossal massif that was heaving to fall on me. Nearly falling over backwards, I saw at last its clock-tower crown, surging and sounding with height and sound. Its bell toll rose only when you looked into its high window, and it rolled low with the wind. In amazement, I tried to get the others to look up. I saw my Egyptian brother falling backward as he strained his head. The other family seemed distracted. The Polish woman walked silently and serenely around the perimeter of the nobility's court, itself gentle and green, well tended. A waterfall fell down a cliff-face from the courtyard straight in line with the tower, making a right-angle with the flat ground of the court, and welling into a pool near the tourists.

Following this, my dad and I 'captured' two Catholic Poles and asked them questions about the Pope. I was very (and am, have always been somewhat) open to Catholicism on the whole (especially the earliest seeds, and cultural universalism), but my dad made several wry jokes about Poles and their Catholic traditions, prying and poking at them in a kind but penetrating way.

Before this trip fell underway, I was in a rush and urge to prepare myself - and that preparation was needed. I had looked into a mirror and saw I'd grown very thick and curling hair upon my shoulders, neck and upper back! I felt ready to wrestle King Kong. With a will, I began shaving myself in anticipation of meeting non-hairy people in foreign lands. In reality, I'm smoothskinned nearly all over.

From the East the Donkey Came, Mally's Meek, Prophecy of the End (self-sung)!

2010-05-29T02:41:00.000-07:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yoOyIl2LIs&feature=related

This song originally hails from a 12th century Latin song "Orientis Partibus" which first appeared in France and is usually attributed to Pierre de Corbeil, Bishop of Sens (d 1222) ("Office de la circoncision," "Lew manuscrit de l’office de la Circoncision de Notre-Dame-du-Puy," or "L’Office de Pierre de Corbeil," circa 1210). The Feast of the Circumcision is celebrated on January 1. The song is associated with the Feast of Fools.

The tune is said to have been part of the Fete de l’Ane (The Donkey’s Festival), which celebrated the flight of the Holy Family into Egypt and was a regular Christmas observance in Beauvais and Sens, France in the 13th century. During the mass, it was common for a donkey to be led or ridden into the church.

The words and tune were designed to give thanks for the ass on which Mary rode, and began: Orientis partibus Adventavit asinus (‘From the East the ass has come’). Each verse was sung, and finished with the chorus ‘Hail, Sir donkey, hail’. It was a solemn affair, but the tune became very popular in 17th and 18th century Germany.

Orientis partibus
adventavit asinus,
pulcher et fortissimus,
Sarcinis aptissimus.

Hez, Sire Asne, hez!

Hic in collibus Sychen
iam nutritus sub Ruben
transiit per Jordanem
saliit in Bethlehem

Saltu vincit hinnulos
damas et capreolos
super dromedarios
velox madianeos

Dum trahit vehicula
multa cum sarcinula
illius mandibula
dura terit pabula

Cum aristis, hordeum
comedit et carduum
triticum ex palea
segregat in area

Amen dicas, asine
Iam satur ex gramine
amen, amen itera
aspernare vetera

An English Translation:
In Easter Lands
the ass arrived
beautiful and strongest,
for burden fittest made.

Here in the hills of Sychen
nursed now below Ruben,
he crosses over Jordan
he enters Bethlehem!

In his leaps he conquers mules
fallow deer and roebucks
and surpasses camels
so speedy of the Medes.

While he pulls the wagons,
many loaded heavy,
using his jaws,
he grinds the tough fodder.

He eats barley, beards and all,
and the spiny thistles,
Separates the wheat from chaff
on the threshing floor.

You say Amen to the ass,
now all filled with grass!
"Amen, Amen!" once again,
spurning what is passed.

**********************
From the East the donkey came,Stout
and strong as twenty men;Ears like wings and eyes like flame,Striding
into Bethlehem.Faster than the deer he
leapt,With his burden on his back;Though all other creatures
slept,Still the ass kept on his track.Still
he draws his heavy load,Fed on barley and rough hay;
Pulling on along the road--Donkey,pull our sins away!Wrap him now in cloth of gold;All rejoice who see him pass;Mirth inhabit young and old On this Feast Day of the Ass.
Refrain: Heh! Heh, Sir Ass, Oh Heh!

***********************
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeRPZS5-4Vc

***********************
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHYLpHb3NOo

Clan and Cousin Cluster in Michigan

2010-05-27T13:56:00.000-07:00

Thursday afternoon clear, unclammy and cloudless. Went critter watching with cousin's son Athan, looking upclose at ant-mounds, subterranean groundhog kingdoms, sunfish, frogs, toads, spider webs, water spiders, snake-holes, and poison ivy (Athan [6 years?] noted that an ivy palm missing two leaves is one-leaved but STILL infectious!). After this, we carved AthaN-athan crossword style into a beech. Appalachian grandparents and 20-some relations present.

Cheesequest

2010-05-23T19:17:00.000-07:00

I cycled with my merry men 20 miles to & from Monroe for Baumgartners Cheese Store & Tavern (Limburger Liverwurst on rye), the Swiss House (Ribeye sandwiches) & outdoor munchables along the way. Geo-cache found under bridge. The tree-lined path crossed brooks, ran tween cooling cliff-faces, went flanked by phlox all purple & most
poisonous pretty hemlocks. Moonshadows followed us home.

Summermon

2010-05-20T18:16:00.000-07:00

Overheard from Memorial Union lakefront on Tuesday evening: "This cup is too round!" (why she spilled down shirt). "My dog ate all my friends' weed out of all their purses!". Sign on water: "For swimmer's health, please do not feed ducks." Logic? Is proscriptive, or *pre*scriptive?

Advice from my friend named Alan, GodsoS, a local personage

2010-05-18T17:07:00.001-07:00

Soul you shun
B
Solution
contrary 2 it B

Eclipse seen at Ugarit

2010-05-08T22:24:00.000-07:00

Ere dawn. I'm warming myself from winter-weather with hot spiced mead, taters, German Weisswurst, leeks, log-grown shitakes, scrambled eggs, quinoa-cakes, and soft inner cat-tail stems on this May 9th anniversary of the solar eclipse of 1012 BC. Am singing back and forth with a singer, songs by heart.

Ere sunset. In sunlit grass. Exchange of songs, stories, whinnies and whimsies with person patient enough to laugh at my spilling a half bottle of kefir inside my leather satchel and cleaning out the gooey contents on the green ground.

Ere Moonday. Pease (that's singular) soup, superb with just firm (just so) carrots. Just so stories. But this story, so written, was also so done. Snuggled over divan, bounded past the threshold, eves of the chamber, O'Murchadh's night-stead.

Afterfreeze. Moonday. Thank God moon is veiled. Nearly new, makes me unblue. I feel so warm inside when so cold out. Summermonth brings wet not het. Summer-me is all het. I only masochistically enjoyed my cycle ride in the bone-shivering rain, but loved the sacks of vittles I got out of it (from Asian foodstore)

Dogs use people as a ruse in order to court each other

2010-05-05T22:53:00.000-07:00

I went to the 'dog therapy' petting day where dogs agree to come together to soothe people. The dogs used this opportunity to focus on other dogs, smell the dog-smell spread around on everyone's petting hands, frolick with canine friends and ignore the humans, many of whom were touching each other's hands for the first time inside luxuriant fur.

Joculatores Upsaliensis - Swedish radio for ongoing streams of Early Music

2010-05-05T22:42:00.000-07:00

Joculatores Upsalienses Radio – Last.fm

Kameradschaft aus Germania

2010-04-29T23:07:00.000-07:00

I shared delightful German talk with a seventy-six year-old from Mecklenburg. We agreed that "Nice to meet you" was a bad goodbye after quickly meeting, and that smuggling beer into public places was praiseworthy.

Broom of the Cowdenknowes

2010-04-27T12:03:00.000-07:00

I've stored this song in me for years, especially the second version (second half) in the first link. Feel love/contentment in hearing it again.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbAtvbvs5HQ

Clear harping Alys Howe's sung version, and not in Scots

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-S-8rOOxA8&feature=related

Enlightenment about Beauty

2010-04-26T08:38:00.000-07:00

Radici nel cemento - Bella ciccia

{Catching breath and wiping sweat from brow} - I totally agree!

Unearthing spring goodnesses on two wheels

2010-04-20T14:10:00.000-07:00

After eating dandelion heads, linden tree leaflets, and garlic mustard in the sunshine, I went out on two wheels for adventure. I cycled round and round the near east side, the crooks, nooks, nannies and crannies of near-east Madison Wisconsin, soaking in the gentle sun. Visited St Vincent de Paul, Lazy Jane's Cafe, Cafe Zoma (back garden), Willy Street Co-op, Kitchen Gallery, Green Owl Cafe, In the Company of Thieves (Gorham), Mildred's Sandwich Shop, and Bradbury's (N. Hamilton - local food). Alas Sofia's Bakery and its pear ginger sauced waffles weren't available.

Eivør Pálsdóttir - Àtjan

2010-04-13T21:52:00.001-07:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxenk06JfQA&feature=related

(Faroese)

Atticelebrative

2010-04-13T14:29:00.000-07:00

Copper glinting ale by chimney. At further end, my family (Season 5 :-) )

Hairhoremones

Belgian ale (V-12, 12%, Victory Brewing) in the attic

Tippling over plate

Lox onion dandelion cave-cheese salad in my cave.

Keeping cave warm and cosy

Looking at journal. Will I write in it....

Olivia Walton, the mother (Michael Learned)

John Walton, the father (Ralph Waite)

Zebulun Walton, the grandfather (Will Geer)

Ike Godsey, general store runner (Joe Conley)

Ep Bridges, sheriff (Cleve Richardson)

Erin Walton, 2nd youngest daughter (Mary Elizabeth McDonough)

Elizabeth Walton, youngest daughter (Kami Cotler)

John Boy Walton, oldest son (Richard Thomas)

Pieces in Park

2010-04-10T15:07:00.000-07:00

Madison Wisconsin's Peace Park is now *Pieces in Park* (no peace is in park)

PaPa Laughs at Himself after Speaking of How 'Vigourous' He and Fern Have Remained into Their 80s

2010-04-05T15:25:00.000-07:00

Having Fun _Saying Words_ in Your Community

2010-04-05T15:16:00.000-07:00

I abhor abbreviations - because the things they stand for are more stimulating & because mouthing letters (not words) slowly erases brains - buries the referent till you don't know what you're saying anymore. Words are pictures = sensuality = automatic memory cache. Letter codes estrange the symbols.

Take PDQ (a filling station in America): Once you start calling it Pretty Dern Quick, or Pounds of Duds & Quacks instead, it makes a picture imprint on your brain (stimulation!), aids memory, and is more fun to talk about in your community.

The New Ireland Gives Up on Friction Power, Dual Carriageway Bridges, Umbrella Headwear, and Fake Babies

2010-03-30T11:11:00.000-07:00

This report is based on a dream I dreamed on March 4th of this year (2010). It began outside, in Ireland, somewhere between Dublin and the west country. A ‘high-quality dual carriageway’ bridge was being built over a tiny stream, absurdly tiny, babblingly beautiful. As the project went on, bands of people milled about, interrupting the workers, asking questions, and sitting off in groups of twos and fours to smoke and grouse. There was a lot of sniggering and shaking of heads. Some people were taking country strolls over the bridge, pretending it was a pedestrian boardwalk and tapping their canes on it. I walked all around, touring with my sister, who’d heard that the Irish had just invented a special umbrella that could be fixed to the top of your head like a hat, look all ruffled and gorgeous, then gush out at the push of a button, completely inflated, whenever the drizzle came down. What new rave was this? I wondered. To find out, she and I ran off to a shop where the hat-a-gamps or umbronnets were sold, but the vendor shook her head and rolled her eyes, almost melancholy like: “All outta stock. I’ll be glad if I never see one again. They’re not for Irish people, mind you. Not too practical either.”

The dream’s final scene played out in a house where we were guesting. Instead of depending on the grid, you had to generate your own electric by running your fingers up and down transparent tubes containing some special (secret) liquid. I started feeling out this long tube, squeezing it like a plastic syphon, and following it down a spiral staircase all the way into the cellar. To my dumbfoundment, the bottom of the tube was puffing out particles of fluffy lint and static air, looking like dandelion seed-puffs blown and huffed by some kids. A faint whistling sound filled the room. The tube bifurcated right down to the floor and straight into a pudgy baby lying in a crib. The baby was white, bulgy and bubbly, like it had been moulded from clay or plastic or some weird hardening agent spilling out the end of the tube. In my astonishment, I reached my finger out to touch the baby’s cheek and O no! I noticed that my finger left a wee indentation, as if the baby were really made of clay. I then touched its lips, and, to my horror, the entire mouth disappeared, and the baby’s face began puffing and going blue. What had I done? I frantically touched the spot again to make the mouth come back, but instead erased the whole face with my hands! I turned tail and split, running away from the house.

Whatever Ireland is made of, it isn’t made of big roads, weird hats, static electric and plastic babies. The people don’t seem convinced of that either. The ‘toy stuff’ and material fun ain’t gonna last, and I could almost hear the public sighing, sighing in relief. A lot of low-down, hang-dog depressed ‘rich people’ were going poor again: “Thank God we can get back to life as usual. Don’t mind if we have a drink.”

Why am I Healed? One Knows

2010-03-26T09:22:00.000-07:00

I drank two quarts (1,872 ml) of lemon juice, 1 quart of spicy V-8, 1 quart of kombucha, 1.5 flasks of wine in the past 48 hours.

Swallowed a mass of herbal tea, beef, onions and garlic. Not to mention some fat slices of pizza.

O I drank more water than the total of all the other liquids. Have eaten fruit, sandwiches, raw greens, petfood supplements, lemons. Swigged fish-oil. Eaten liver. Eaten blue-green algae capsules from Lake Klamath. Indeed my friends, I think despite how good the bevs/viands made me feel, it was TIME and my happy Bod which healed me. And today I am healed. ;)

Nathan Paul Hillman is healed. A tree bears fruit because it's a magic tree. Water flows downhill because it's bewitched. Nathan is well again because life's a miraculous exception to the rule.

Nerve Bundle

2010-03-26T03:01:00.000-07:00

"senses a dangerous nerve bundle in the surrounding culture, rippling over to edges of the globe, an undercurrent of panic feeding off of personal emptiness - a swelling and seething hysteria building up after such overstimulation spills off and people are left alone with themselves and their raging needs - up until now barely fending off the void...."

People Afraid of Ritual Want Random Events Controlled by a 'Safe Programmer' !

2010-03-18T23:31:00.000-07:00

I dreamt this dream on March 13th, 2010. In it I witnessed the effects of a ‘Reality Game’ generated (supposedly) by a computer programmed by humans to arrange hologram ‘reality events’ in random, complex patterns such that any real-life decisions which the human players made actually spurred the computer to fire back seemingly unpredictable phenomena. I believe the dream symbolises the direction which American and industrial Asian societies in particular are tracking. As far as the human players were concerned, the point seemed to be the desire to be caught up in something which seemed (most excitingly) out of their control, and which also gave them an air of heroism (‘purpose’) devoid of responsibility and social accountability. I won’t claim that the human players lived out their roles devoid of any sense of personal or social ethics, but the charge which people got out of gaming (an experimental stage) meant that many of the players would commit heinous acts out of sheer boredom, curiosity, or a desire to mess with the computer. People seemed to delight in the fun of guessing “Is this real or isn’t this?” If the gamers commited ‘bold acts’, it was only because they naively assumed a computer generated life couldn’t lead to REAL death, love, loss, disappointment, grief or pain. In other words, it allowed the participants to avoid all the very things they most needed to come to terms with in their plastic lives, and spelled out a perfect chess-board of self-deception. Within this frame of deception, I saw keenly the presence of demons, delighting in the folly and frailty of the human inventers.

Being keenly critical of such things in my own waking world, I was even more critical of this particular ‘game’ in the context of my dream – partly because it worked out to my own peril and isolation and, frankly, angered me to the point of driving me to use a spiritual exorcism to combat the series of events interplaying between human and computer. What I found most void and vapid about the game was its clear role in society as a *surrogate* ritual – a sham counterfeit to stand in the place of the many rituals of life, death, love, passage, voyage, work, clan, reunion, parting (etc) which pre-modern societies enact as extensions of a single integrative world-view.

In my dream, the contents of the game played out in a perfect pastiche of my parent’s and Oregon sister’s house. The players did not primarily consist of my family members – rather I sensed that my family members were suffering from the damnable trip the players were getting out of playing their game.

In the perception of the participants, ‘virtual’ objects and dangers would seem so real that one could no longer distinguish between real and virtual. Though I wasn’t a willing participant, I realised that I couldn’t ignore or escape the plot of this game.

My first face-off with the game was with a creature I did not know was real or virtual. A huge swooping venom-green serpent coiled through the air straight at me. I dodged to one side – it passed me by. As the game developed, I noticed that the participants became increasingly uneasy; it was a relief actually. Their healthy fear seemed to me a good sign!

And yet they weren’t near afraid enough (one is reminded of those who graspingly took Sauron’s gift-rings). I suspected that the humans had not only used the computers to create ‘bad art’ (trivial, reality-shunning, nature-hating), but that actual supernatural forces were at work to toy with the Materialists who’d created the game. When a ‘virtual’ suicide hanging occurred in the house attic and players advised me to take no notice (“It’s not real!”), I became even more convinced they were victims of moral delusion: they themselves might soon be dangling from the ends of ropes. I toyed with the idea of camping out in this attic – because I guessed any place the players were so keen to avoid had to be of central importance. Yet I was jittery, uneasy. I was partly unsure myself what was going on.

I went outside. I walked along a long dark beach. I noticed that shapes and shadows eavesdropped on my peripheral vision. I hurried back indoors. By this time the game seemed like no game at all. It was more like being trapped in some version of _The Exorcist_. I went to the top level of my parents’ house – to the room in which my sister and I had grown up. I noticed that some bunched bundled shape was shooting underneath all the blankets, carpets and curtains. The shapes then shifted into creatures. Even the house cat (was it the house cat?) changed its form. I began speaking out in a rhythmic voice, chanting, but couldn’t catch my breath to make audible sound. Once I gained strength, I resonated with power and banished the apparitions or forms from the household through intercessory prayers and petitions.

Once all the ‘excitement’ had ended, my family and I went back to the social rituals and dramas of our real lives with a vengeance – and life was good, not a dull or meaningless moment! The Mundane was full of Art and Narrative and Wonder. There was no need to add in a mind-blurring game to replace the ritual of a communal meal or bedtime story or lover’s walk. The grid and embroidery of our lives was undergirded by our faith that everything in the world and through time hung together in one piece. No one seemed to worry about techniques and proper results as much as becoming a family again. In place of robots, we got our human beings back.

Paleo-Nate: This makes me very happy. My brother in-law in touch

2010-03-16T17:29:00.000-07:00

Paleo-Nate: This makes me very happy. My brother in-law in touch

Tracing Interlacing Trails

2010-03-15T11:45:00.000-07:00

I have just stumbled into someone along the byways of Madison, a Welsh woman of Aberystwyth, who offered for my dwelling a stone cottage facing the Irish Sea. She splits her year between B&B and home in Wales, and lingering ties to Wisconsin. I met her Cambrian son, an English teacher in Morocco, and learned that her former husband is the famous Irish professor in Classics I once took notes for.

Haienwatha and the Hart-Crown of Hickory

2010-03-12T19:29:00.000-08:00

Friday afternoon, the Twelfth of March, I dreamt. I had somehow been appointed a 'Rescuer' of some ten to twelve 'White Brides', all abducted by Eastern Native Americans in a wild past age, or in some remote future when America was being rebirthed.

Each bride had been force-wed to a powerful chieftain. I don't remember the early 'rescues' I made (or what I did with the Brides), only the last one, for my pursuer outdid any Indian I'd ever seen, living or dead. I felt a temptation even to worship him. In fact, he's one of my great heroes.

The Indians were riding over broad grass-grown hills by the sea, and I fled before them with a beautiful White Bride on a proud white horse, over a stream and high bank, over a hedge and stone fence into a meadow of oaks.

Behind me, on the plain, I saw an army of thousands. The plain rang, and clear voices vibrated like trumpets. I heard resonant pealing shouts of "Hiya-WATHA! Hiya-WATHA! Hiya-WATHA!"

The great Chieftain, an Iroquois (my own bloodline, since Cherokee were Iroquoian) came riding behind, and he had a tall upright crown of hazel and hickory rising up from his shoulderblades and collarbone on either side. They rose up vertical like small trees, gnarled and finger-limbed, intertwining like wicker. It struck me to the core, and I wanted to follow him...but I was leading his bride.

I climbed a tree with the White Bride, while an Indian guide climbed up with me, telling me if I wasn't brave enough to kill Hiawatha, he (my guide) would kill ME.

And up he came up the tree after us, and I stabbed Hiawatha between the collarbone and the neck, about three times, while my guide said earnestly: "There must be blood. I need to see blood."
And there was blood. I don't think he died nevertheless.

I was stung with remorse, and bewilderment at what was happening, for I so admired this Hiawatha/Haienwatha. What a great and sad irony that this namesake of the Onondagan follower of the Great Peacemaker (Deganawida), and enforcer of the Peacemaker's vision, fell under my blade in my dream.

Bardic Autumn Term

2010-03-08T14:46:00.001-08:00

I was admitted this morning (the Occident evening) with funding to the University of Aberystwyth (Wales) to learn a poet's trade. Bardic banter straight ahead. Ws, Ys, DDs, RHs, LLs, and THs beckon and bait me.

The Merry Mouth of Ystwyth Wants to Munch Me !

2010-03-05T14:07:00.000-08:00

Professor Jem Poster at U of Aberystwyth says my CW application is strong and desires to tele-interview with me! I've arranged to speak with him this coming Monday in the late morning - in the British evening.

Creepsy does it spine-sneaky tingle creepsy - ancient sounds of JOY, fierce joy

2010-03-04T16:17:00.000-08:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3B3Ojdr51Fc

Born Geniuses of Blind Repair :)

2010-03-04T14:23:00.000-08:00

I dreamt today that I visited a bicycle shop in which the blind technicians repaired things by means of touch, hearing and sound.

I should clarify that they were more interested in loud verbal diagnosis than actually REPAIRING anything! They told me exactly what was wrong with my bicycle, and proceded to do nothing about it. :)

Carro della Morte

2010-03-02T17:27:00.000-08:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jo02H7HT0J

The piece itself (anonymous, 1400s-1500s) comes from the powerful Florentine court of Medici and counts as one of many processionals of _Trionfo_ (Triumph), of Love or Death, syncretised with Roman tradition at that time. The background painting on youtube is _San Giorgio contro il drago_ - 'Saint George against the Dragon', by Vittore Carpaccio (c. 1460 – 1525/1526) of the Venetian school. The latter worked under Gentile Bellini.

Ladders and Libraries

2010-03-01T18:20:00.000-08:00

I dreamt today I found a huge colour-illustrated book called The Encyclopædia of Dramatic Treaties which the Greeks and the Jews Have Made with Foreign Peoples. It was on a top shelf in an underground library and only reachable with a ladder.

KaBOOM

2010-02-26T15:39:00.000-08:00

http://www.minyanville.com/businessmarkets/articles/america-money-printing-national-debt-petroleum/2/24/2010/id/26982?page=full

Laying hands on St Patrick !

2010-02-25T15:16:00.000-08:00

dreamt that he healed St Patrick by laying hands on him, after which Patty turned into a girl and glowed like a white diamond. I was glowing too. Actually, it wasn't clear who healed WHO. What was stranger still: St Patrick knocked on my office door as if he were my client, and called himself _An Iap_ (_An_ ('the') Irish American Post?

?) !

I also dreamt that there was an urban drug bust outside 'The Waltons' household. Neat thing was that I got to make fond memories with John Boy and Grandfather.

Feb Fullish-ruary Moonish

2010-02-24T09:47:00.000-08:00

As of yesterday, February 24th, I was attacked by the raised forearm of my client repeatedly for a half hour until she apologised and complete forgiveness reigned, i.e. no documentation shall remember her behaviour.

As of yesterday, I've been side-struck by a car three times and three times without injury.

The culprit in this case was a mother driver attending to her one-year old in the rear seat. I saw her stopped at a driveway to a business as I came down a sidewalk of a very busy road (too busy to cycle upon). I always stop for such people, never assume they see me. I did this time as well. We were both stopped. I tried to make eye contact with her. I went forward cautiously and saw her start to drive as soon as the front half of my bike was in front of her hood. So she crumpled over my front tire as I leaped off, falling down since I tripped with one leg, but I was out of harm's way and did not hurt myself in the landing. It was a cheap extra bicycle and I was unhurt, her car unscathed, so we let things go. I prefer private citizens to come to terms with common-sense things w/o police involvement if possible. I think she learned her lesson in any case. She was in an utter panic afterwards, and came up with four contradictory stories, a couple of them claiming she had seen me before she hit me!

To speak is to sing

2010-02-22T14:12:00.000-08:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-G_v6-u3hg&feature=related

Dennis Gerrolt asking John Ronald Reuel Tolkien dense one-dimensional questions on BBC 4 and getting deft replies.

I've listened to this clip of a BBC interview of John Ronald Reuel Tolkien about seven times today, mostly to take in the cadence and music of his speech, which I find as compelling as Middle-earth itself. But I consider Tolkien's grasp of the cosmic refreshingly...rooted. The interviewer is so narrow and unidimensional in most of his queries, trying to peg down and reduce Middle-earth to author-sourced trivia. Tolkien easily defies, outwits, evades him. The man simply sees longeval and further, was not born in our media-box.

The Dream of Eight and Ivy

2010-02-20T15:10:00.000-08:00

I dreamt I visited a girl and her family. They owned a pet dog, a pet cat, and a pet panther. The little dog (so wee) was the leader of the lot, even of the family. The pets padded freely from room to room, but the girl lived in a dug-out pen and smiled at me her guest.

To reach my hosts, I drove my car to a strange 'space-warp' in Minnesota - namely a roadmaze leading to a Figure-Eight Motorway without an exit. One of its loops was much bigger than the other - so it was a lopsided 8. The INSIDES of the loops sunk much lower than the ‘Eightway ’. My girl host lived smack in the middle of the smaller loop, and there was no road to her home except for muddy and dug-out paths.

On my return journey, I entered a heart-pushing rushing realm of limbs and leaves overhead. They clothed the road in green, and I lurched to reach a firey sunset lit over the edge of a meadow, as if it were an entry to paradise. I was cycling.

My wheels went along great bicycle pathways shooting high (in upside down U-Arches) over freeways. The lanes were hidden by high walls so grown with ivy and creepers that a cyclist's skyline was quite masked by leaves. So I pedaled forward ‘by faith’, occasionally peeking up over and down the leaf-line when I paused on the highest hill brows.

Benevolent Dream-Deeds

2010-02-19T14:41:00.000-08:00

I dreamt last night I saved a small boy (who turned into a girl) from being hit by a car. It was tricky using the phones afterwards though. Their ear-pieces extended outward like deflated balloons.

Wanton Seed

2010-02-19T14:38:00.000-08:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wcNkJuhrfc&feature=related

http://www.nicjones.net/index.htm

This year's spring time walking song. I've tried it out on my voice several times, got it memorised and like the fit.

Calling for Mutton

2009-12-13T16:55:00.001-08:00

March marches away on a Devil's Day

Cloud and mist stick. Smothery smeeth hangs thick on the world.
False Spring. Devil’s Dew.
Went out in the brew, sickle-cycling my swath to work.
Sweet and short – pulled a one-hour shift.
One shifty devil’s hour had a whole day’s
moil and mishap.
Missed my headphone set, must borrow another’s
ear-wax.
There I sat, lax, stuck to purgatory call (Big Apple Bawl)
under cataracts of blatherspitten New-Yoik-blab.
Bombastic blubbering.
Ten minutes to quit,
Call Takeover beckons; declined it, inclining to my own,
heeded my own
headwires.
Seconds to punch-out, in comes another
incoming call,
taken over by another
Call-Takeover victim.
I fled the building under pelting rain
inside a black sack, plastic tack, I’d pinched from a break-room can.
I came home to Commune,
met a Matterhorn of dishes, an undainty duty,
skyhigh and scum-sty during Commune party.
The culprits did their damndest to serve cheap liquors,
mixed in mut-bowls beyond recognition,
a sot rendition.
Not a drop of goodly ale,
wine or mead or needed cidre,
or brindled braggit!
I balk at the sweet bile hungrily swilled by boys.
L’s devilled eggs mended much – gave S. a needed snack.
The Devil’s a chef among lesser fiends.
After scullery slavery and ovarious bites,
S. and I nestled in
for Michael Collins and mutually gnawed a mutton shank.
She’s the first woman I’ve sunk teeth into one bone with!
Mouth-millers mutually munching,
unsheepishly on mutton.
Meet teeth tearing the meat.

-Nathan Paul Hillman, 2007-2009

The Mere

2009-11-04T16:38:00.000-08:00

There lies a mere behind the house,
an oval of glass unstirring.
An Edge, an Eave enfolds one end,
a forest heaven-bounding.
Water shadows mirror back
shining stars in blackness,
Quivering.
A dimshade cloaks the Wooded Side
under tree shapes stooping,
Listening.
Fishes flit the murky depths,
their scales like mirrors,
Flashing,
Glistening.

Nph, 1988

Writing for Unhallow Masses Day (Halloween 2009)

2009-10-31T08:44:00.000-07:00

Myself, I'm with a sore throat, but have been cooking lovely things for me:

Hot stew of coconut milk, portabellas, pablanos, Indian lime [lime,fenugreek,mustard,red chili,turmeric], clams, fried mackerel[red chili,honey], garlic, leeks, watercress and redwine.

It was so good, I had a gustatory climax.

It's a good antiviral. People should enjoy the flu more often. The best part is how I get to terrify species of the even-toed ungulate Order. A few have hurtled off cliffs.

My virus added to the flavour. I've been terrifying herds of proactive healthy swine who refuse all contact with each other, always wash their 'hooves', and go grunting wallowing in a long queue to hog some ditch-resort vaccine.

I made a phone die with my bad breath. Distance btw mouth and phone: ca. 900 miles.

Sun upon Sea-Green

2009-10-25T18:43:00.000-07:00

After a walk, I saw Ranfax briefly. I was dangling from chinup bars and she tickled me from behind. Wanted to take her and hug her like mad. In the evening after work, she finger-stalked my side where I sat on a chair near M.G. I caught her hand. With a squeal, she pulled back heavily and I held my grasp. The entire chair moved, rotating. She slid in a circle, her nightgown slipping on the smoothe floor. She rolled round in front of the chair, her back to me. I tickled her sides. She flung her legs up in the air and wriggled wildly. The golden sheaves of her hair fell undulating across my lap, silkily splayed out and scented with bath salts. Her sunlocks crowned a satiny green blouse: Bright gold and the green silk flashing. Her cheeks flushed like red wine filling a glass. Her eyes were as blue as hyacinth, her lips crimson. M.G. kindly condescended, fatherly like. I kept silent. Couldn't speak. She shied off as he blustered: "What a bread-baker, what precocious intellect (for her age). She's a good kid." I looked at her squarely: "I never thought of her as a kid." 13 March 1996

Your blush-hue makes me fill wine-red to the top like a poured glass. The venison-rich kineflesh - life-fattening, grassfed - makes our cheeks flush red. My skin stains crimson in the sea-wind. My nose fills with reek of lambwool, saltwind, grass-cud, cow udder, kine-dung, heather and whin on the wind. Wombsap and springseed, autumn sweet and winter salt, tears and laughs. Deerherding storm girls roll wind-high over sea-cliffs. Willow-wallow-haired woman, winsome, toothsome, resinous, sustaining. Sun-locks over greensod. 24-25 October 2009

Determinism

2009-09-17T14:31:00.001-07:00

Deterministic paralysis - our inability to make a better basic life for ourselves. It isn't for lack of genius we're stuck, it's because we're...afraid. We owe our present paralysis (in part) to the _philosophy_ behind social evolutionary theory.

"The old tyrants invoked the past; the new tyrants will invoke the future. Evolution has produced the snail and the owl; evolution can produce a workman who wants no more space than a snail, and no more light than an owl. The employer need not mind sending a Kaffir to work underground; he will soon become an underground animal, like a mole. He need not mind sending a diver to hold his breath in the deep seas; he will soon be a deep-sea animal. Men need not trouble to alter conditions, CONDITIONS WILL SOON ALTER MEN. The head can be beaten small enough to fit the hat. Do not knock the fetters off the slave; knock the slave until he forgets the fetters."

-G.K. Chesterton (_What's Wrong with the World_).

Damnation, it's time to alter conditions and cease being double-minded doubting human dastards, mere products/outcomes. We're not products - we're CREATORS (sub-creators, works of art).

The Superego-randy Ayn Rand and related terrors

2009-09-17T14:07:00.000-07:00

Below find copied text of Jonathan Chait's 'Wealthcare', taken from _The New Republic_

http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/wealthcare-0?page=0,2

The current era of Democratic governance has provoked a florid response on the right, ranging from the prosaic (routine denunciations of big spending and debt) to the overheated (fears of socialism) to the lunatic (the belief that Democrats plan to put the elderly to death). Amid this cacophony of rage and dread, there has emerged one anxiety that is an actual idea, and not a mere slogan or factual misapprehension. The idea is that the United States is divided into two classes--the hard-working productive elite, and the indolent masses leeching off their labor by means of confiscatory taxes and transfer programs.

You can find iterations of this worldview and this moral judgment everywhere on the right. Consider a few samples of the rhetoric. In an op-ed piece last spring, Arthur Brooks, the president of the American Enterprise Institute, called for conservatives to wage a "culture war" over capitalism. "Social Democrats are working to create a society where the majority are net recipients of the ‘sharing economy,' " he wrote. "Advocates of free enterprise . . . have to declare that it is a moral issue to confiscate more income from the minority simply because the government can." Brooks identified the constituency for his beliefs as "the people who were doing the important things right--and who are now watching elected politicians reward those who did the important things wrong." Senator Jim DeMint echoed this analysis when he lamented that "there are two Americas but not the kind John Edwards was talking about. It's not so much the haves and the have-nots. It's those who are paying for government and those who are getting government. "

Pat Toomey, the former president of the Club for Growth and a Republican candidate for the Senate in Pennsylvania, has recently expressed an allegorical version of this idea, in the form of an altered version of the tale of the Little Red Hen. In Toomey's rendering, the hen tries to persuade the other animals to help her plant some wheat seeds, and then reap the wheat, and then bake it into bread. The animals refuse each time. But when the bread is done, they demand a share. The government seizes the bread from the hen and distributes it to the "not productive" fellow animals. After that, the hen stops baking bread.

This view of society and social justice appeared also in the bitter commentary on the economic crisis offered up by various Wall Street types, and recorded by Gabriel Sherman in New York magazine last April. One hedge-fund analyst thundered that "the government wants me to be a slave!" Another fantasized, "JP Morgan and all these guys should go on strike--see what happens to the country without Wall Street." And the most attention-getting manifestation of this line of thought certainly belonged to the CNBC reporter Rick Santelli, whose rant against government intervention transformed him into a cult hero. In a burst of angry verbiage, Santelli exclaimed: "Why don't you put up a website to have people vote on the Internet as a referendum to see if we really want to subsidize the losers' mortgages, or would we like to at least buy cars and buy houses in foreclosure and give them to people that might have a chance to actually prosper down the road and reward people that could carry the water instead of drink the water!"

Most recently the worldview that I am describing has colored much of the conservative outrage at the prospect of health care reform, which some have called a "redistribution of health" from those wise enough to have secured health insurance to those who have not. "President Obama says he will cover thirty to forty to fifty million people who are not covered now--without it costing any money," fumed Rudolph Giuliani. "They will have to cut other services, cut programs. They will have to be making decisions about people who are elderly." At a health care town hall in Kokomo, Indiana, one protester framed the case against health care reform positively, as an open defense of the virtues of selfishness. "I'm responsible for myself and I'm not responsible for other people," he explained in his turn at the microphone, to applause. "I should get the fruits of my labor and I shouldn't have to divvy it up with other people." (The speaker turned out to be unemployed, but still determined to keep for himself the fruits of his currently non-existent labors.)

In these disparate comments we can see the outlines of a coherent view of society. It expresses its opposition to redistribution not in practical terms--that taking from the rich harms the economy--but in moral absolutes, that taking from the rich is wrong. It likewise glorifies selfishness as a virtue. It denies any basis, other than raw force, for using government to reduce economic inequality. It holds people completely responsible for their own success or failure, and thus concludes that when government helps the disadvantaged, it consequently punishes virtue and rewards sloth. And it indulges the hopeful prospect that the rich will revolt against their ill treatment by going on strike, simultaneously punishing the inferiors who have exploited them while teaching them the folly of their ways.

There is another way to describe this conservative idea. It is the ideology of Ayn Rand. Some, though not all, of the conservatives protesting against redistribution and conferring the highest moral prestige upon material success explicitly identify themselves as acolytes of Rand. (As Santelli later explained, "I know this may not sound very humanitarian, but at the end of the day I'm an Ayn Rand-er.") Rand is everywhere in this right-wing mood. Her novels are enjoying a huge boost in sales. Popular conservative talk show hosts such as Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck have touted her vision as a prophetic analysis of the present crisis. "Many of us who know Rand's work," wrote Stephen Moore in the Wall Street Journal last January, "have noticed that with each passing week, and with each successive bailout plan and economic-stimulus scheme out of Washington, our current politicians are committing the very acts of economic lunacy that Atlas Shrugged parodied in 1957."

Christopher Hayes of The Nation recently recalled one of his first days in high school, when he met a tall, geeky kid named Phil Kerpen, who asked him, "Have you ever read Ayn Rand?" Kerpen is now the director of policy for the conservative lobby Americans for Prosperity and an occasional right-wing talking head on cable television. He represents a now-familiar type. The young, especially young men, thrill to Rand's black-and-white ethics and her veneration of the alienated outsider, shunned by a world that does not understand his gifts. (It is one of the ironies, and the attractions, of Rand's capitalists that they are depicted as heroes of alienation.) Her novels tend to strike their readers with the power of revelation, and they are read less like fiction and more like self-help literature, like spiritual guidance. Again and again, readers would write Rand to tell her that their encounter with her work felt like having their eyes open for the first time in their lives. "For over half a century," writes Jennifer Burns in her new biography of this strange and rather sinister figure, "Rand has been the ultimate gateway drug to life on the right."

The likes of Gale Norton, George Gilder, Charles Murray, and many others have cited Rand as an influence. Rand acolytes such as Alan Greenspan and Martin Anderson have held important positions in Republican politics. "What she did--through long discussions and lots of arguments into the night--was to make me think why capitalism is not only efficient and practical, but also moral," attested Greenspan. In 1987, The New York Times called Rand the "novelist laureate" of the Reagan administration. Reagan's nominee for commerce secretary, C. William Verity Jr., kept a passage from Atlas Shrugged on his desk, including the line "How well you do your work . . . [is] the only measure of human value."

Today numerous CEOs swear by Rand. One of them is John Allison, the outspoken head of BB&T, who has made large grants to several universities contingent upon their making Atlas Shrugged mandatory reading for their students. In 1991, the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club polled readers on what book had influenced them the most. Atlas Shrugged finished second, behind only the Bible. There is now talk of filming the book again, possibly as a miniseries, possibly with Charlize Theron. Rand's books still sell more than half a million copies a year. Her ideas have swirled below the surface of conservative thought for half a century, but now the particulars of our moment--the economic predicament, the Democratic control of government--have drawn them suddenly to the foreground.

II.

Rand's early life mirrored the experience of her most devoted readers. A bright but socially awkward woman, she harbored the suspicion early on that her intellectual gifts caused classmates to shun her. She was born Alissa Rosenbaum in 1905 in St. Petersburg. Her Russian-Jewish family faced severe state discrimination, first for being Jewish under the czars, and then for being wealthy merchants under the Bolsheviks, who stole her family's home and business for the alleged benefit of the people.

Anne C. Heller, in her skillful life of Rand, traces the roots of Rand's philosophy to an even earlier age. (Heller paints a more detailed and engaging portrait of Rand's interior life, while Burns more thoroughly analyzes her ideas.) Around the age of five, Alissa Rosenbaum's mother instructed her to put away some of her toys for a year. She offered up her favorite possessions, thinking of the joy that she would feel when she got them back after a long wait. When the year had passed, she asked her mother for the toys, only to be told she had given them away to an orphanage. Heller remarks that "this may have been Rand's first encounter with injustice masquerading as what she would later acidly call ‘altruism.’ " (The anti-government activist Grover Norquist has told a similar story from childhood, in which his father would steal bites of his ice cream cone, labelling each bite "sales tax" or "income tax." The psychological link between a certain form of childhood deprivation and extreme libertarianism awaits serious study.)

Rosenbaum dreamed of fame as a novelist and a scriptwriter, and fled to the United States in 1926, at the age of twenty-one. There she adopted her new name, for reasons that remain unclear. Rand found relatives to support her temporarily in Chicago, before making her way to Hollywood. Her timing was perfect: the industry was booming, and she happened to have a chance encounter with the director Cecil B. DeMille--who, amazingly, gave a script-reading job to the young immigrant who had not yet quite mastered the English language. Rand used her perch as a launching pad for a career as a writer for the stage and the screen.

Rand’s political philosophy remained amorphous in her early years. Aside from a revulsion at communism, her primary influence was Nietzsche, whose exaltation of the superior individual spoke to her personally. She wrote of one of the protagonists of her stories that "he does not understand, because he has no organ for understanding, the necessity, meaning, or importance of other people"; and she meant this as praise. Her political worldview began to crystallize during the New Deal, which she immediately interpreted as a straight imitation of Bolshevism. Rand threw herself into advocacy for Wendell Wilkie, the Republican presidential nominee in 1940, and after Wilkie’s defeat she bitterly predicted "a Totalitarian America, a world of slavery, of starvation, of concentration camps and of firing squads." Her campaign work brought her into closer contact with conservative intellectuals and pro-business organizations, and helped to refine her generalized anti-communist and crudely Nietzschean worldview into a moral defense of the individual will and unrestrained capitalism.

Rand expressed her philosophy primarily through two massive novels: The Fountainhead, which appeared in 1943, and Atlas Shrugged, which appeared in 1957. Both tomes, each a runaway best-seller, portrayed the struggle of a brilliant and ferociously individualistic man punished for his virtues by the weak-minded masses. It was Atlas Shrugged that Rand deemed the apogee of her life’s work and the definitive statement of her philosophy. She believed that the principle of trade governed all human relationships--that in a free market one earned money only by creating value for others. Hence, one’s value to society could be measured by his income. History largely consisted of "looters and moochers" stealing from society’s productive elements.

In essence, Rand advocated an inverted Marxism. In the Marxist analysis, workers produce all value, and capitalists merely leech off their labor. Rand posited the opposite. In Atlas Shrugged, her hero, John Galt, leads a capitalist strike, in which the brilliant business leaders who drive all progress decide that they will no longer tolerate the parasitic workers exploiting their talent, and so they withdraw from society to create their own capitalistic paradise free of the ungrateful, incompetent masses. Galt articulates Rand’s philosophy:

The man at the top of the intellectual pyramid contributes the most to all those below him, but gets nothing except his material payment, receiving no intellectual bonus from others to add to the value of his time. The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all of their brains. Such is the nature of the "competition" between the strong and the weak of the intellect. Such is the pattern of "exploitation" for which you have damned the strong.

The bifurcated class analysis did not end the similarities between Rand’s worldview and Marxism. Rand’s Russian youth imprinted upon her a belief in the polemical influence of fiction. She once wrote to a friend that "it’s time we realize--as the Reds do--that spreading our ideas in the form of fiction is a great weapon, because it arouses the public to an emotional, as well as intellectual response to our cause." She worked both to propagate her own views and to eliminate opposing views. In 1947 she testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee, arguing that the film Song of Russia, a paean to the Soviet Union made in 1944, represented communist propaganda rather than propaganda for World War II, which is what it really supported. (Rand, like most rightists of her day, opposed American entry into the war.)

In 1950, Rand wrote the influential Screen Guide for Americans, the Motion Picture Alliance’s industry guidebook for avoiding subtle communist influence in its films. The directives, which neatly summarize Rand’s worldview, included such categories as "Don’t Smear The Free Enterprise System," "Don’t Smear Industrialists" ("it is they who created the opportunities for achieving the unprecedented material wealth of the industrial age"), "Don’t Smear Wealth," and "Don’t Deify ‘The Common Man’ " ("if anyone is classified as ‘common’--he can be called ‘common’ only in regard to his personal qualities. It then means that he has no outstanding abilities, no outstanding virtues, no outstanding intelligence. Is that an object of glorification?"). Like her old idol Nietzsche, she denounced a transvaluation of values according to which the strong had been made weak and the weak were praised as the strong.

Rand’s hotly pro-capitalist novels oddly mirrored the Socialist Realist style, with two-dimensional characters serving as ideological props. Burns notes some of the horrifying implications of Atlas Shrugged. "In one scene," she reports, "[Rand] describes in careful detail the characteristics of passengers doomed to perish in a violent railroad clash, making it clear their deaths are warranted by their ideological errors." The subculture that formed around her--a cult of the personality if ever there was one--likewise came to resemble a Soviet state in miniature. Beginning with the publication of The Fountainhead, Rand began to attract worshipful followers. She cultivated these (mostly) young people interested in her work, and as her fame grew she spent less time engaged in any way with the outside world, and increasingly surrounded herself with her acolytes, who communicated in concepts and terms that the outside world could not comprehend.

Rand called her doctrine "Objectivism," and it eventually expanded well beyond politics and economics to psychology, culture, science (she considered the entire field of physics "corrupt"), and sundry other fields. Objectivism was premised on the absolute centrality of logic to all human endeavors. Emotion and taste had no place. When Rand condemned a piece of literature, art, or music (she favored Romantic Russian melodies from her youth and detested Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms), her followers adopted the judgment. Since Rand disliked facial hair, her admirers went clean-shaven. When she bought a new dining room table, several of them rushed to find the same model for themselves.

Rand’s most important acolyte was Nathan Blumenthal, who first met her as a student infatuated with The Fountainhead. Blumenthal was born in Canada in 1930. In 1949 he wrote to Rand, and began to visit her extensively, and fell under her spell. He eventually changed his name to Nathaniel Branden, signifying in the ancient manner of all converts that he had repudiated his old self and was reborn in the image of Rand, from whom he adapted his new surname. She designated Branden as her intellectual heir.

She allowed him to run the Nathaniel Branden Institute, a small society dedicated to promoting Objectivism through lectures, therapy sessions, and social activities. The courses, he later wrote, began with the premises that "Ayn Rand is the greatest human being who has ever lived" and "Atlas Shrugged is the greatest human achievement in the history of the world." Rand also presided over a more select circle of followers in meetings every Saturday night, invitations to which were highly coveted among the Objectivist faithful. These meetings themselves were frequently ruthless cult-like exercises, with Rand singling out members one at a time for various personality failings, subjecting them to therapy by herself or Branden, or expelling them from the charmed circle altogether.

So strong was the organization’s hold on its members that even those completely excommunicated often maintained their faith. In 1967, for example, the journalist Edith Efron was, in Heller’s account, "tried in absentia and purged, for gossiping, or lying, or refusing to lie, or flirting; surviving witnesses couldn’t agree on exactly what she did." Upon her expulsion, Efron wrote to Rand that "I fully and profoundly agree with the moral judgment you have made of me, and with the action you have taken to end social relations." One of the Institute’s therapists counseled Efron’s eighteen-year-old son, also an Objectivist, to cut all ties with his mother, and made him feel unwelcome in the group when he refused to do so. (Efron’s brother, another Objectivist, did temporarily disown her.)

Sex and romance loomed unusually large in Rand’s worldview. Objectivism taught that intellectual parity is the sole legitimate basis for romantic or sexual attraction. Coincidentally enough, this doctrine cleared the way for Rand--a woman possessed of looks that could be charitably described as unusual, along with abysmal personal hygiene and grooming habits--to seduce young men in her orbit. Rand not only persuaded Branden, who was twenty-five years her junior, to undertake a long-term sexual relationship with her, she also persuaded both her husband and Branden’s wife to consent to this arrangement. (They had no rational basis on which to object, she argued.) But she prudently instructed them to keep the affair secret from the other members of the Objectivist inner circle.

At some point, inevitably, the arrangement began to go very badly. Branden’s wife began to break down--Rand diagnosed her with "emotionalism," never imagining that her sexual adventures might have contributed to the young woman’s distraught state. Branden himself found the affair ever more burdensome and grew emotionally and sexually withdrawn from Rand. At one point Branden suggested to Rand that a second affair with another woman closer to his age might revive his lust. Alas, Rand--whose intellectual adjudications once again eerily tracked her self-interest--determined that doing so would "destroy his mind." He would have to remain with her. Eventually Branden confessed to Rand that he could no longer muster any sexual attraction for her, and later that he actually had undertaken an affair with another woman despite Rand’s denying him permission. After raging at Branden, Rand excommunicated him fully. The two agreed not to divulge their affair. Branden told his followers only that he had "betrayed the principles of Objectivism" in an "unforgiveable" manner and renounced his role within the organization.

Rand’s inner circle turned quickly and viciously on their former superior. Alan Greenspan, a cherished Rand confidant, signed a letter eschewing any future contact with Branden or his wife. Objectivist students were forced to sign loyalty oaths, which included the promise never to contact Branden, or to buy his forthcoming book or any future books that he might write. Rand’s loyalists expelled those who refused these orders, and also expelled anyone who complained about the tactics used against dissidents. Some of the expelled students, desperate to retain their lifeline to their guru, used pseudonyms to re-enroll in the courses or re-subscribe to her newsletter. But many just drifted away, and over time the Rand cult dwindled to a hardened few.

III.

Ultimately the Objectivist movement failed for the same reason that communism failed: it tried to make its people live by the dictates of a totalizing ideology that failed to honor the realities of human existence. Rand’s movement devolved into a corrupt and cruel parody of itself. She herself never won sustained personal influence within mainstream conservatism or the Republican Party. Her ideological purity and her unstable personality prevented her from forming lasting coalitions with anybody who disagreed with any element of her catechism.

Moreover, her fierce attacks on religion--she derided Christianity, again in a Nietzschean manner, as a religion celebrating victimhood--made her politically radioactive on the right. The Goldwater campaign in 1964 echoed distinctly Randian themes--"profits," the candidate proclaimed, "are the surest sign of responsible behavior"--but he ignored Rand’s overtures to serve as his intellectual guru. He was troubled by her atheism. In an essay in National Review ten years after the publication of Atlas Shrugged, M. Stanton Evans summarized the conservative view on Rand. She "has an excellent grasp of the way capitalism is supposed to work, the efficiencies of free enterprise, the central role of private property and the profit motive, the social and political costs of welfare schemes which seek to compel a false benevolence," he wrote, but unfortunately she rejects "the Christian culture which has given birth to all our freedoms."

The idiosyncracies of Objectivism never extended beyond the Rand cult, though it was a large cult with influential members--and yet her central contribution to right-wing thought has retained enormous influence. That contribution was to express the opposition to economic redistribution in moral terms, as a moral depravity. A long and deep strand of classical liberal thought, stretching back to Locke, placed the individual in sole possession of his own economic destiny. The political scientist C. B. MacPherson called this idea "possessive individualism," or "making the individual the sole proprietor of his own person and capacities, owing nothing to society for them." The theory of possessive individualism came under attack in the Marxist tradition, but until the era of the New Deal it was generally accepted as a more or less accurate depiction of the actual social and economic order. But beginning in the mid-1930s, and continuing into the postwar years, American society saw widespread transfers of wealth from the rich to the poor and the middle class. In this context, the theory of possessive individualism could easily evolve into a complaint against the exploitation of the rich. Rand pioneered this leap of logic--the ideological pity of the rich for the oppression that they suffer as a class.

There was more to Rand’s appeal. In the wake of a depression that undermined the prestige of business, and then a postwar economy that was characterized by the impersonal corporation, her revival of the capitalist as a romantic hero, even a superhuman figure, naturally flattered the business elite. Here was a woman saying what so many of them understood instinctively. "For twenty-five years," gushed a steel executive to Rand, "I have been yelling my head off about the little-realized fact that eggheads, socialists, communists, professors, and so-called liberals do not understand how goods are produced. Even the men who work at the machines do not understand it." Rand, finally, restored the boss to his rightful mythic place.

On top of all these philosophical compliments to success and business, Rand tapped into a latent elitism that had fallen into political disrepute but never disappeared from the economic right. Ludwig von Mises once enthused to Rand, "You have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told them: you are inferior and all the improvements in your condition which you simply take for granted you owe to the effort of men who are better than you." Rand articulated the terror that conservatives felt at the rapid leveling of incomes in that era--their sense of being singled out by a raging mob. She depicted the world in apocalyptic terms. Even slow encroachments of the welfare state, such as the minimum wage or public housing, struck her as totalitarian. She lashed out at John Kennedy in a polemical nonfiction tome entitled The Fascist New Frontier, anticipating by several decades Jonah Goldberg’s equally wild Liberal Fascism.

Rand’s most enduring accomplishment was to infuse laissez-faire economics with the sort of moralistic passion that had once been found only on the left. Prior to Rand’s time, two theories undergirded economic conservatism. The first was Social Darwinism, the notion that the advancement of the human race, like other natural species, relied on the propagation of successful traits from one generation to the next, and that the free market served as the equivalent of natural selection, in which government interference would retard progress. The second was neoclassical economics, which, in its most simplistic form, described the marketplace as a perfectly self-correcting instrument. These two theories had in common a practical quality. They described a laissez-faire system that worked to the benefit of all, and warned that intervention would bring harmful consequences. But Rand, by contrast, argued for laissez-faire capitalism as an ethical system. She did believe that the rich pulled forward society for the benefit of one and all, but beyond that, she portrayed the act of taxing the rich to aid the poor as a moral offense.

Countless conservatives and libertarians have adopted this premise as an ideological foundation for the promotion of their own interests. They may believe the consequentialist arguments against redistribution--that Bill Clinton’s move to render the tax code slightly more progressive would induce economic calamity, or that George W. Bush’s making the tax code somewhat less progressive would usher in a boom; but the utter failure of those predictions to come to pass provoked no re-thinking whatever on the economic right. For it harbored a deeper belief in the immorality of redistribution, a righteous sense that the federal tax code and budget represent a form of organized looting aimed at society’s most virtuous--and this sense, which remains unshakeable, was owed in good measure to Ayn Rand.

II.

III.

The economic right may believe religiously in their moral view of wealth, but we do not have to respect it as we might respect religious faith. For it does not transcend--perhaps no religion should transcend--empirical scrutiny. On the contrary, this conservative view, the Randian inversion of the Marxist worldview, rests upon a series of propositions that can be falsified by data.

Let us begin with the premise that wealth represents a sign of personal virtue--thrift, hard work, and the rest--and poverty the lack thereof. Many Republicans consider the link between income and the work ethic so self-evident that they use the terms "rich" and "hard-working" interchangeably, and likewise "poor" and "lazy." The conservative pundit Dick Morris accuses Obama of "rewarding failure and penalizing hard work" through his tax plan. His comrade Bill O’Reilly complains that progressive taxation benefits "folks who dropped out of school, who are too lazy to hold a job, who smoke reefers 24/7."

A related complaint against redistribution holds that the rich earn their higher pay because of their nonstop devotion to office work--a grueling marathon of meetings and emails that makes the working life of the typical nine-to-five middle-class drone a vacation by comparison. "People just don’t get it. I’m attached to my BlackBerry," complained one Wall Streeter to Sherman. "I get calls at two in the morning, when the market moves. That costs money.”

Now, it is certainly true that working hard can increase one’s chances of growing rich. It does not necessarily follow, however, that the rich work harder than the poor. Indeed, there are many ways in which the poor work harder than the rich. As the economist Daniel Hamermesh discovered, low-income workers are more likely to work the night shift and more prone to suffering workplace injuries than high-income workers. White-collar workers put in those longer hours because their jobs are not physically exhausting. Few titans of finance would care to trade their fifteen-hour day sitting in a mesh chair working out complex problems behind a computer for an eight-hour day on their feet behind a sales counter.

For conservatives, the causal connection between virtue and success is not merely ideological, it is also deeply personal. It forms the basis of their admiration of themselves. If you ask a rich person whether he ascribes his success to good fortune or his own merit, the answer will probably tell you whether that person inhabits the economic left or the economic right. Rand held up her own meteoric rise from penniless immigrant to wealthy author as a case study of the individualist ethos. "No one helped me," she wrote, "nor did I think at any time that it was anyone’s duty to help me."

But this was false. Rand spent her first months in this country subsisting on loans from relatives in Chicago, which she promised to repay lavishly when she struck it rich. (She reneged, never speaking to her Chicago family again.) She also enjoyed the great fortune of breaking into Hollywood at the moment it was exploding in size, and of bumping into DeMille. Many writers equal to her in their talents never got the chance to develop their abilities. That was not because they were bad or delinquent people. They were merely the victims of the commonplace phenomenon that Bernard Williams described as "moral luck."

Not surprisingly, the argument that getting rich often entails a great deal of luck tends to drive conservatives to apoplexy. This spring the Cornell economist Robert Frank, writing in The New York Times, made the seemingly banal point that luck, in addition to talent and hard work, usually plays a role in an individual’s success. Frank’s blasphemy earned him an invitation on Fox News, where he would play the role of the loony liberal spitting in the face of middle-class values. The interview offers a remarkable testament to the belligerence with which conservatives cling to the mythology of heroic capitalist individualism. As the Fox host, Stuart Varney, restated Frank’s outrageous claims, a voice in the studio can actually be heard laughing off-camera. Varney treated Frank’s argument with total incredulity, offering up ripostes such as "That’s outrageous! That is outrageous!" and "That’s nonsense! That is nonsense!" Turning the topic to his own inspiring rags-to-riches tale, Varney asked: "Do you know what risk is involved in trying to work for a major American network with a British accent?"

There seems to be something almost inherent in the right-wing psychology that drives its rich adherents to dismiss the role of luck--all the circumstances that must break right for even the most inspired entrepreneur--in their own success. They would rather be vain than grateful. So seductive do they find this mythology that they omit major episodes of their own life, or furnish themselves with preposterous explanations (such as the supposed handicap of making it in American television with a British accent--are there any Brits in this country who have not been invited to appear on television?) to tailor reality to fit the requirements of the fantasy.

The association of wealth with virtue necessarily requires the free marketer to play down the role of class. Arthur Brooks, in his book Gross National Happiness, concedes that "the gap between the richest and poorest members of society is far wider than in many other developed countries. But there is also far more opportunity . . . there is in fact an amazing amount of economic mobility in America." In reality, as a study earlier this year by the Brookings Institution and Pew Charitable Trusts reported, the United States ranks near the bottom of advanced countries in its economic mobility. The study found that family background exerts a stronger influence on a person’s income than even his education level. And its most striking finding revealed that you are more likely to make your way into the highest-earning one-fifth of the population if you were born into the top fifth and did not attain a college degree than if you were born into the bottom fifth and did. In other words, if you regard a college degree as a rough proxy for intelligence or hard work, then you are economically better off to be born rich, dumb, and lazy than poor, smart, and industrious.

In addition to describing the rich as "hard-working," conservatives also have the regular habit of describing them as "productive." Gregory Mankiw describes Obama’s plan to make the tax code more progressive as allowing a person to "lay claim to the wealth of his more productive neighbor." In the same vein, George Will laments that progressive taxes "reduce the role of merit in the allocation of social rewards--merit as markets measure it, in terms of value added to the economy." The assumption here is that one’s income level reflects one’s productivity or contribution to the economy.

Is income really a measure of productivity? Of course not. Consider your own profession. Do your colleagues who demonstrate the greatest skill unfailingly earn the most money, and those with the most meager skill the least money? I certainly cannot say that of my profession. Nor do I know anybody who would say that of his own line of work. Most of us perceive a world with its share of overpaid incompetents and underpaid talents. Which is to say, we rightly reject the notion of the market as the perfect gauge of social value.

Now assume that this principle were to apply not only within a profession--that a dentist earning $200,000 a year must be contributing exactly twice as much to society as a dentist earning $100,000 a year--but also between professions. Then you are left with the assertion that Donald Trump contributes more to society than a thousand teachers, nurses, or police officers. It is Wall Street, of course, that offers the ultimate rebuttal of the assumption that the market determines social value. An enormous proportion of upper-income growth over the last twenty-five years accrued to an industry that created massive negative social value--enriching itself through the creation of a massive bubble, the deflation of which has brought about worldwide suffering.

If one’s income reflects one’s contribution to society, then why has the distribution of income changed so radically over the last three decades? While we ponder that question, consider a defense of inequality from the perspective of three decades ago. In 1972, Irving Kristol wrote that

Human talents and abilities, as measured, do tend to distribute themselves along a bell-shaped curve, with most people clustered around the middle, and with much smaller percentages at the lower and higher ends. . . . This explains one of the most extraordinary (and little-noticed) features of 20th-century societies: how relatively invulnerable the distribution of income is to the efforts of politicians and ideologues to manipulate it. In all the Western nations--the United States, Sweden, the United Kingdom, France, Germany--despite the varieties of social and economic policies of their governments, the distribution of income is strikingly similar.

So Kristol thought the bell-shaped distribution of income in the United States, and the similarly shaped distributions among our economic peers, proved that income inequality merely followed the natural inequality of human talent. As it happens, Kristol wrote that passage shortly before a boom in inequality, one that drove the income share of the highest-earning 1 percent of the population from around 8 percent (when he was writing) to 24 percent today, and which stretched the bell curve of the income distribution into a distended sloping curve with a lengthy right tail. At the same time, America has also grown vastly more unequal in comparison with the European countries cited by Kristol.

This suggests one of two possibilities. The first is that the inherent human talent of America’s economic elite has massively increased over the last generation, relative to that of the American middle class and that of the European economic elite. The second is that bargaining power, political power, and other circumstances can effect the distribution of income--which is to say, again, that one’s income level is not a good indicator of a person’s ability, let alone of a person’s social value.

The final feature of Randian thought that has come to dominate the right is its apocalyptic thinking about redistribution. Rand taught hysteria. The expressions of terror at the "confiscation" and "looting" of wealth, and the loose talk of the rich going on strike, stands in sharp contrast to the decidedly non-Bolshevik measures that they claim to describe. The reality of the contemporary United States is that, even as income inequality has exploded, the average tax rate paid by the top 1 percent has fallen by about one-third over the last twenty-five years. Again: it has fallen. The rich have gotten unimaginably richer, and at the same time their tax burden has dropped significantly. And yet conservatives routinely describe this state of affairs as intolerably oppressive to the rich. Since the share of the national income accruing to the rich has grown faster than their average tax rate has shrunk, they have paid an ever-rising share of the federal tax burden. This is the fact that so vexes the right.

Most of the right-wing commentary purporting to prove that the rich bear the overwhelming burden of government relies upon the simple trick of citing only the income tax, which is progressive, while ignoring more regressive levies. A brief overview of the facts lends some perspective to the fears of a new Red Terror. Our government divides its functions between the federal, state, and local levels. State and local governments tend to raise revenue in ways that tax the poor at higher rates than the rich. (It is difficult for a state or a locality to maintain higher rates on the rich, who can easily move to another town or state that offers lower rates.) The federal government raises some of its revenue from progressive sources, such as the income tax, but also healthy chunks from regressive levies, such as the payroll tax.

The sum total of these taxes levies a slightly higher rate on the rich. The bottom 99 percent of taxpayers pay 29.4 percent of their income in local, state, and federal taxes. The top 1 percent pay an average total tax rate of 30.9 percent--slightly higher, but hardly the sort of punishment that ought to prompt thoughts of withdrawing from society to create a secret realm of capitalistic übermenschen. These numbers tend to bounce back and forth, depending upon which party controls the government at any given time. If Obama succeeds in enacting his tax policies, the tax burden on the rich will bump up slightly, just as it bumped down under George W. Bush.

What is so striking, and serves as the clearest mark of Rand’s lasting influence, is the language of moral absolutism applied by the right to these questions. Conservatives define the see-sawing of the federal tax-and-transfer system between slightly redistributive and very slightly redistributive as a culture war over capitalism, or a final battle to save the free enterprise system from the hoard of free-riders. And Obama certainly is expanding the role of the federal government, though probably less than George W. Bush did. (The Democratic health care bills would add considerably less net expenditure to the federal budget than Bush’s prescription drug benefit.) The hysteria lies in the realization that Obama would make the government more redistributive--that he would steal from the virtuous (them) and give to the undeserving.

Like many other followers of Rand, John Allison of BB&T has taken to claiming vindication in the convulsive events of the past year. "Rand predicted what would happen fifty years ago,” he told The New York Times. "It’s a nightmare for anyone who supports individual rights." If Rand was truly right, of course, then Allison will flee his home and join his fellow supermen in some distant capitalist nirvana. So perhaps the economic crisis may bring some good after all.

Jonathan Chait is a senior editor at The New Republic.

Not again! (Flippancy aint Humour, folks)

2009-06-30T13:45:00.000-07:00

I don't know how many times I have to stress this.

Many times, I guess.

The principle is simple: Flippancy and Humour stand at opposite ends of a spectrum. They are not the same thing. The only way in which they are related is that some real people happen to laugh at flippancy and mockery and slander. At one time, them were fightin words. Now, them's deseperate attempts to get a giggle out of someone. It's not surprising. As soon as people had nothing else they believed in, there was nothing to laugh at anymore. Effective humour requires contrast. The contrast of mockery is reverence. Without reverence in society, in the viewers themselves, the mockery can't be tweaked so as to be funny, because there's no normative point with which to contrast. So people had to invent impossible scenes in which they mocked and slandered stereotypes which were no longer believed in or even held to be true anymore.

Without the dim possibility of a real Big Foot stomping about at large, and real believers stomping about after him, there's no 'humour' in making mock Big Foot stories or media.

But flippancy has moved far past masquerading as humour. It's moved far past its lack of contrast for any deep effect. It's begun to take sadistic, gloating delight in putting down others with whom the comedy makers may harshly disagree (or imagine their viewers will), or in denigrating people whom one may disrespect (usually from a considerable distance, since little real worldview dialogue is current and popular in the world). So this new 'laughter' is actually the same thing as dismissive cruelty, since the cosmetic smiles are cracked in ignorance - in ignorance of the one or the thing which is mocked. Good humour requires audience knowledge and does not rely on ignorance nor disrespect!

Mockery is reactionary. It has no fixed and founded ground of its own making - it relies on the Other in order to make a point. But it's ceased to understand, love, or even vaguely respect the Other. Mockery is meant to whip people into a sort of frenzy. It just so happens that people post 1970s in particular associate such frenzy with fun and laughter! People became so depressed that they couldn't laugh unless they entered into a sort of mindless, unanalytical frenzy. So now anyone and anything possible is a prey of flippancy: the Holocaust, Slavery, people being tortured in Guantanamo Bay, live pets and animals who have accidents (self-injurious) on film, marching protesters believing in a cause, racial and religious stereotypes (by far the most innocent among the kinds of predation going on).

You see, for those who don't believe in anything, it causes them fear, loss, insecurity, irritability. They need to assuage their paralysis and cowardice by mocking and deriding others.

And they don't do so with RESPECT. True humour always contains an element of dignity and respect (cf. Fawlty Towers). False humour relies heavily on DISRESPECT. The creators of such comedy use disrespect because they're people with disrespectful, angry, insecure insides. They can't get through their day without cracking up laughing at something - and now they have to root around for things to laugh at, so miserable, dry and empty and black have their lives become!

It's no wonder they seek out 'comedy'. They find it so hard to laugh at *anything* anymore - and that's because they've become people of desensitivity and disbelief. For those who don't believe in the wonder of the world, there's very very little left to smile or laugh at. True humour always contains a very tiny element of joy - a joy which creeps up on you, stings you under your funnybone, and helps you see that Absurdity is Beautiful because Absurdity is Normative and Innocent and Wonderful! False humour is a cover-up for depression, tunnel-vision, myopia, misery.

So laughs are people's dope now - they no longer are deep laughs. For deep laughter requires contrast with something that is innocent, pure, solemn, true. And the contrast is done with dignity, not with a desire to torture, mock or destroy.

The present laughs are not gotten by virtue of the contents of the comedy, but by the aura, the presentation by means of which the comedy strains to exist and please: i.e., the commentator's tone of voice, his (often flippant, flabbergasted, teasing) facial expressions, his timing, his environment, the use of clever sounds and shapes to startle the viewer. But when the raw substance and contents of the slander and mockery (of other human beings) are examined, there's very little found to be 'funny' in such contents. A dry transcription of most comedy movies out today would lend even more credence to that.

But credence from whom?

That's the real connivance, why distinctions from viewers can't be made. Comedy is a perception, and perception (not contents) is the quickest and easiest thing to manipulate and corrupt. For those who have no beliefs, all their perceptions are skewed as well.

NpH

Currants from Corinth

2009-06-26T14:27:00.000-07:00

Speak in tongues,
utter from angel lips,
murmur from man’s mouth.
Let your harp
cut and carp,
strut with strings.
Echo with your gong
Pierce with your pipe
Singe with your sound.
Muse without music,
Lilt without love,
Sear with sheer pitch,
Resound with din,
Pound.
Prophesy, fair one.
Crack all mysteries,
Sack all books,
Crush all mountains,
Mash them aside
with wiley will,
with fractioned faith.
Fling off, doff, your wealth,
Pile the poor with monies.
Your house stands bare,
a coffin of bones,
alone
without love.

Love is patient
Love is kind,
envy-less
boast-less,
unpumped with airy pride.
Unpeeled, it pervades,
Deals in substance.
Secure, it sucks no blood.
Love relishes in right,
Shoots blanks at felonies.
It blots out the page
of Wrongs,
won’t demand to damn.
It erodes the record of villainy.
Blithely, forgets how to blame,
minds only what is good.
Seeks past itself,
wrathless melts,
prideless, dights,
dignifies.

It flees the dark,
Comes out of hiding,
shamelessly sides
with truth.
It preserves and wards,
serves.

It trembles with trust,
beyond proof,
beyond pain,
past doubt.
It’s high on hope,
perduring despair.
It walks both oasis
and waste.

It cheats Death.

Where tongues tease –
they’ll peter out,
teeter,
ceasing all sound.
Lungs expire,
dwindle.
Fickle flames,
once kindled,
smoulder.
The wisdom,
once filling,
now fails and fades.

We know but bits,
the chaff of ages.
The wind blows dust
away.
You soothesay tomorrow,
but the tale will turn,
wind another way.

One-hearted,
Undepleted
in grown completion,
the child’s clamor
changes to conjugal Song.

The child whines,
wallows in wants –
mounts on its demands.
Once grown, unalone,
the suckling sighs,
needs no milk,
milks life back into man.
The young thing grows,
groans in pain,
goes gallant in love,
and grand.
Seeing, she
gains face.
Caught in corridors
of mirrors,
he fights for unmirrored sight.
The narcissist annihilates,
slips herself in shards
of shiny glass,
reflections estranged,
manged,
cracked.
Set free,
her self sees face to face.
She knows bits,
He knows parts.
Their vision reaches, split.
Eyes strain to see and know.
We love in part,
We see all split.
Love will defeat
all fracture.

The giver of life,
maker of face,
knows fully our fibers,
threads them through.
We’re fully seen, fully loved.
One day we’ll fully know.

Inspired by 1 Corinthians 13

Gad Hab

2009-06-25T11:59:00.001-07:00

When the fig tree won't spring buds
When the vine won't swell with grapes
When the hives of honey fail
When the olives lack and languish
When the fields unfold no food
When the lambs won't throng my pen,
When the calves won't fill my stalls,
Yet,
Still,
Then even more,
I'll rejoice in my LORD,
Exult in my saving God.
God, my maker, is my strength.
He makes my feet gad,
go glad like deer hooves.
He lets me leap high on the heights !

Taken from Habakkuk 3

Kindlestroke

2009-06-25T11:40:00.000-07:00

I taught Israel to walk,
took her by her arms --
she didn't know I weened her.
I drew her with cords,
gentle as mother,
led her by bands of love.
I lightened her neck,
took off her yoke,
stooped to her
and fed her.
How can I give her up?
How can I hand her over?
My heart turns over within me --
All my compassions kindle !
I won't live out my anger --
I'll let it run off.
I'll lift her from her grave,
bear her from her bier,
replace her pall with bridal cloth.
Her I won't see will-broken--
for I am God, not a man,
the Sacred One in your midst.
I'll put off my wringing strength,
I'll put on my healing stroke.

Taken from Hosea 11

Cher-ish Chase

2009-06-16T16:01:00.000-07:00

Missing you and springromp in bunnyhumpwoods,
woodwandering for rare rabbitrutting.
I loove you longday toothsomely.
Damedovey woveybelle bolsters my boyheart.
Newmorning steptraces are laced with laughs.
Smile-leaping little lad lurches with longing.
Innocent scent and sight make goldlight.
Laughter runs rippling.
Hands, hinderless, hold unslipping.
My head swims smitten by care-bee swarm round my honeyhead.
Goodbye-beegirl bye-girl blisskisses tuck me in in my Be-ing.
Drearless sweetdream wraps me.
Lovewoven, I lay me down.

A Gale of Goidelic

2009-06-16T15:43:00.000-07:00

http://www.myspace.com/brianohairt

Do listen over Ta na Paipeir dha Saighneail (Irish) and Puirt a Beul (Scots Gaelic).

My heart is mastered by my Goidelic songmaster.

The Limits of Political Capital

2009-06-15T16:02:00.000-07:00

http://www.facebook.com/ext/share.php?sid=87967853109&h=ytYvP&u=ckb0Z&ref=nf

The Identity Crisis of Mouse

2009-06-11T12:08:00.000-07:00

Last night, I dreamt about a mouse who wanted to become a human being. She grew bigger and bigger in her cage, then leaped out one day up my shirt sleeve. I untucked her, then she shapeshifted into a woman. I escorted her around a city, trying to find a human mate for her. She wanted someone who believed in her mouse story.

Demon-Limbs. The Anatomy of Death

2009-06-06T15:03:00.000-07:00

During the morning of June 6th, I dreamt. Within my dream, an American friend of mine came to visit and wished to be put up in my room. It was 10am (the very clock-time of my dream) and I was still sleepy and told him I wished to go back to sleep. He said he was tired as well.

Before we slept, I told him the tale of an earlier dream I'd had an hour or two ago - a dream itself broken by waking up in my very room for real at 9:30am before falling back asleep and continuing to dream about meeting this guest.

I made my guest a bed and he lay down very tired. As he reclined, I noticed he had an extra set of arms with claws. The arms moved involuntarily and were attached thinly like insect legs to a thorax. The two appendages were bloody, like flesh and muscle without skin, and the muscles were hard and ripply, but emaciated.

"Would you like me to take these off you?" I asked him, welling up with horror and pity. "Yeah", he feebly answered, and seemed on the verge of weeping, but he was too tired and doped - like one beset with a parasite - to cry at all. He fell fast asleep.

I looked around and saw an open pocket knife with a sharp edge. It lay folded open. I picked it up, took a deep breath, and with all my will I cut through the right demon-arm. "This is my room, this is my body, this is god's temple, this is holy ground, this is sacred created humanity in my care. You will have no house here." I hewed at the second limb and saw with relief how the knife cut through the shoulder joint like bread. I was nearly in tears in my desire to set him free, to see him rid of these ghastly, parasitic limbs.

There they lay wriggling and dying beside him - his Morbid Anatomy amputated. His very identity surged back into his bloodstream, feeding his own arms and legs, feet and hands.

I drew the covers off him to staunch the blood and make sure he was alright. He slept like a kitten, breathing deep, barely stirring. Then I saw in fear and terror that his lower body lay amputated beneath him, severed from his top half by the hip. His hip came narrow and wasplike together, not at all the sound Son of Adam my friend had one time been.

I saw that both his feet lay severed from his body - fragmented, isolated, soul-less, alone . . . 'specialised'. His Morbid Anatomy would not sustain his very life. I looked on him, afraid he would awake, terrified he would not wake. He lay dying.

He lay there, made up of no more than head and trunk. All limbs had fallen off. It was as if a Sex-Insect had transposed itself on his body like a succubus and bitten through his life-limbs. I recalled that above the bed of one of my female friends hung such an Insect: merciless, identity-less, hard, cruel, and with heaving muscles like that of man in sad and desperate sexual intercourse. But the figure was nothing more than a nervous system, lost to love, lost to romance, lost to emotion, lost to the bliss of created purpose.

I looked upon the friend I'd tried to save. My heart beat faster and faster. I knew I would now be regarded as a criminal for my hospital house venture. I'd failed. I'd hewn off the cancer, but killed the cancer addict with its removal. I'd sought to heal him, heal anyone, of the evil that stole away their power to love. He didn't know what ailed him. He'd needed and wanted help but was too weak to even ask for it. He'd enjoyed those limbs for a while, until he realised they were not a part of his own body.

As I woke up I knew what he was. He was a corrupted American in a crumbling Babylon - and he stood for every prey American in large and looming symbolism. If the cancer, if the predator Demon-Limbs were removed from such an infected soul, the person would die! I knew I'd doctored and loved and tried to save them, but they had not Will left to want to be healed of an advanced disease - so advanced it felt like nourishment and stimulation itself. Those people I most had loved had become dependent upon something that was sucking their life away. To sever that connexion was to kill the person. Such a salvation was as sad as the rosewood stake through an incipient Vampire's heart. But even a staked Vampire finds joy beyond the Grave, release from pain and lust - from the need to fill his gap with the souls of others.

He was a Vampire.

She was a Vampire too.

How I loved him. How I loved her. If only she would find her face. Then she could face me, feel love, keep love, feed love, jump in jubilance.

Her Anatomy had no wholeness.

Soul-less limbs wriggled, clutched, multiplied.

The people, hypnotised, magnetically fascinated, stare upon their extra writhing limbs.

Moodly Mollum Pie

2009-05-12T15:24:00.000-07:00

I cannot consider your endeavor
but the pittily wittily poo-hooing of tommy tykes tootads,
jaggwars wammy blammy gimm
hoodly moodly mollum pie
huddly roddlum cody coody sodd
while gargol golly molly sings sally bolly
and lickum lackum doodlum hadd
astrummin shick shack mick sack bodd
to get gallant groon from groggy grawn moon
out of weevil sippin hip-sap nibbles
and touchy lappy topwilly nipples.

Despite the Puritans' shirkin curtains,
I love and limp for shrine shrimps
while cookin gibble gobble imps
blimpy pimply pumpkin bottom dimps
yellow yarrow dallow marrow
fillow fallow harrow mellow
lamber pimber wamber somber
nimble clamber fimble romble
in order to assemble my timber tempered bumble tambre
cryin crap crimble tipple tumbler
whimsy hams gotta clam wam
icky ooey mooey gooey all over gummy gams
stuffin puff laughy luffy cushy maam
smiff smile stiff riffraff pile cooloff Nile

I'm invariably butting in as well as out,
whether terrible furor weather
waps the blither heather wether
or hinges on whether I toothe on tether
and deny all killjoy pilljoy silly sally stilljoy,
still my willjoy makes frilly dill molly spill
blimey wimey bill boys

Written during consumption of a fine mediaeval Belgian ale
-Nph

'Wanted, an Unpractical Man' - IDEALISM, Live !

2009-04-09T15:04:00.000-07:00

".... the egg only exists to produce the chicken. But the chicken does not exist only in order to produce another egg. He may also exist to amuse himself, to praise God, and even to suggest ideas to a French dramatist. Being a conscious life, he is, or may be, valuable in himself. Now our modern politics are full of a noisy forgetfulness; forgetfulness that the production of this happy and conscious life is after all the aim of all complexities and compromises. We talk of nothing but useful men and working institutions; that is, we only think of the chickens as things that will lay more eggs. Instead of seeking to breed our ideal bird, the eagle of Zeus or the Swan of Avon, or whatever we happen to want, we talk entirely in terms of the process and the embryo. The process itself, divorced from its divine object, becomes doubtful and even morbid; poison enters the embryo of everything; and our politics are rotten eggs.

Idealism is only considering everything in its *practical* essence. Idealism only means that we should consider a poker in reference to poking before we discuss its suitability for wife-beating; that we should ask if an egg is good enough for practical poultry-rearing before we decide that the egg is bad enough for practical politics. But I know that this primary pursuit of the theory (which is but pursuit of the aim) exposes one to the cheap charge of fiddling while Rome is burning. A [certain] school has endeavored to substitute for the moral or social ideals which have hitherto been the the motive of politics a general coherency or completeness in the social system which has gained the nick-name of 'efficiency' .... As far as I can make out, 'efficiency' means that we ought to discover everything about a machine except what it is for. There has arisen in our time a most singular fancy: the fancy that when things go very wrong we need a practical man. It would be far truer to say, that when things go very wrong we need an unpractical man. Certainly, at least, we need a theorist. A practical man means a man accustomed to mere daily practice, to the way things commonly work. When things will not work, you must have the thinker, the man who has some doctrine about why they work at all. It is wrong to fiddle while Rome is burning; but it is quite right to study the theory of hydraulics while Rome is burning."

Gilbert Keith Chesterton, What Is Wrong with the World, 'An Unpractical Man' (1910)

Timid Teachers and Sham Authorities

2009-04-09T14:43:00.000-07:00

"That is the one eternal education; to be sure enough that something is true that you dare to tell it to a child. From this high audacious duty the moderns are fleeing on every side; and the only excuse for them is ... that their modern philosophies are so half-baked and hypothetical that they cannot convince themselves enough to convince even a newborn babe."

G. K. Chesterton, What's Wrong with the World, 'Authority the Unavoidable'

"Now I am concerned, first and last, to mainain that unless you can save the fathers, you cannot save the children; that at present we cannot save others, for we cannot save ourselves. We cannot teach citizenship if we are not citizens; we cannot free others if we have forgotten the appetite of freedom. Education is only truth in a state of transmission; and how can we pass on truth if it has never come into our hand?"

G. K. C., What's Wrong with the World, 'An Evil Cry'

Choice Chesterton at You

2009-04-09T14:34:00.000-07:00

"Only by the hypocritical ignoring of a huge fact can anyone contrive to talk of "free love"; as if love were an episode like lighting a cigarette, or whistling a tune. Suppose whenever a man lit a cigarette, a towering genie arose from the rings of smoke and followed him everywhere as a huge slave. Suppose whenever a man whistled a tune he 'drew an angel down' and had to walk about forever with a seraph on a string. These catastrophic images are but faint parallels to the earthquake consequences that Nature has attached to sex; and it is perfectly plain at the beginning that a [person] cannot be a free lover; he is either a traitor or a tied [human]. The second element that creates the family is that its consequences, though colossal, are gradual; the cigarette produces a baby giant, the song only an infant seraph....

It may be said that this institution of the home is the one anarchist institution. That is to say, it is older than law, and stands outside the State."

-Gilbert Keith Chesterton, What's Wrong with the World, 'The Free Family'

the bridegroom

2009-03-10T09:38:00.000-07:00

I [God] will seek the lost,
trace the strayed,
bind the scathed,
strengthen the scarred,
waken the weak,
break bonds of wrong,
snap hard chains,
undo thrall thongs,
burst bronze doors,
bend iron bars,
cut free the captives,
upraise the oppressed,
dry the tears,
warm the mourner,
comfort the crushed,
mend the rent,
heal the hurt,
kindle kindness
and kinlove in kind,
spur the spouse,
hallow the harlot,
father the orphan,
ward the widow,
lift the low,
save the forsaken,
spare a torn leaf,
bear up your branch,
graft on my vine,
canopy a wick,
fan a flicker to flame,
nurse a suckling,
fondle a foal,
chase in the chicks,
herd the scattered,
enfold the fled,
swaddle the babe,
stoop to feed,
pour to quench,
tie you secure,
take you in my tent,
clothe you in my cloak,
wrap you in my wings,
hem you in my hand,
lull you at dusk,
cheer you at morn,
delight you midday,
walk in your thought,
see your secrets,
beware your worth,
dight you in dignity,
unveil my face,
open my eyes,
smoulder in love,
revive you in fire,
foil your fears,
cancel your debts,
unwrite your wrongs,
warrant your gain,
void your loss,
suspend your pain,
weigh you in glory,
load you in life.

-Nathan Paul Hillman
{a lyrical summary of psalms, prophets, and godspell}

Woolies and Conifers

2009-03-03T11:19:00.000-08:00

Conversation with Steve-O Pet-r-O
on the Fifth of December, 2006
(at the time, Mr O was a sheep-keeper and shite-sweeper in Maine)

16:47 Stephen: gnarlsome natty sasquatchity gnome-like nate of the north!
16:48 me: not nobody but the gnomishest he!
is furry sheepfell feeling good at night?
16:50 how are you keeping?
16:51 Stephen: apologies for the latest maintenance mail
16:52 me: no worries at all woodromping Mainemeandering woolfarmer!
Stephen: i heard some wolves while watching the sun set this eave!
16:53 i hope they aren't too frisky with the pigs
me: wowser. i am jealous. for reasons that will become clearer if you look at my recent dream about a wolf
16:54 I certainly would be frisky with a pig!
your plants ply their growing trade with pious pleasure
16:55 Stephen: great to hear. what say they?
16:56 me: stickety stackety stem i'm green around my hem!
lippety loppety leaf, we miss our farmin steeeeeeeve!
16:58 did lovely conifer class in arboretum on sun-day
17:00 Stephen: what see ye of the aroborvitae?
me: the tree of life gives me life!
17:01 i never realised the name or nature of this most common plant till the course
like spruce needles, the green has vitamin C
17:02 Stephen: did not know that. what was said about pines?
or my favorite, the tamarack (aka european larch)
17:03 me: an algonkian term for an american larch type, i'm told. larch

17:03 me: an algonkian term for an american larch type, i'm told. larch (

hackmatack in Algonkian!

17:04 what learned I?

a cedar is a type of Juniperus (juniper)

17:05 jack pines keep their old resiny cones for years and years until a fire cracks them open to seed

their needles grow spirally

17:06 wind makes diff noise when whishing through 5-needled white pines (feathery) than through the more brittle red pines (2-needled)

juniper 'berries' are built much like cones with a scaley covering around seeds

17:07 firs have upright (not pendulous like pines) cones which fall apart before they fall off tree

17:08 firs have upward curving needles, smooth twigs (spruces have bumpy noduled twigs), and a fruitier taste than spruces

17:09 hemlocks have needles green above and whitish beneath and a hair-like stem attached to each needle

yews are yellowish beneath and dark green above.

17:10 Stephen: yews?
me: not your wives, steve!
those EWES are also yellow beneath but for other reasons!
17:12 yew trees look much like hemlocks or even some firs, but they are darker green, have an orange red berry with seed (turribly toxic)
17:13 arborvitae have flower-shaped cones, small
17:15 sorry for burying you so much in my typing - i get carried away!
and EB is looking on - so i'm entertaining more than usual even
17:17 black spruce are beautiful and fascinating - in WI they only grow in boggy areas, mainly east and north.
17:19 Stephen: and blue spruce?
17:22 me: och yes. i realise now i had misunderstood them. they are the Colorado Spruce, and seem to be tough and hardy and have been bred into many cultivars

Memories of a homeless man sleeping in ICH boiler room

2009-03-02T14:49:00.000-08:00

24 February 2009
17:03 me: what plies below Petro's skies?
17:04 Stephen [Petro]: the eve before travel--the sun is calm as it begins to rest
17:05 me: whither farest thou then?
17:06 Stephen: the land of bluffs and the mighty mississippi
17:09 me: a holy-day, or holy work-a-day?
17:10 what fine news on the Mississip. Sip its supful streams
17:11 Stephen: it will sip with hands that have touched the land, aye hands that know the ground well and what it can do if you treat it well
17:12 me: your landwise hands shall reap handfuls of life
17:13 Stephen: i can only hope--and that they may harbor and encourage it as well
17:17 me: are you uptaken tonight at new wine? i'm not sure, but i considered a visit
how long will you be away as well?
17:18 Stephen: i plan on dining with the dana tonight. and i will be gone until saturday.
17:19 me: dana-dining, dana-charming,
fain aromping
love's alarming
!
17:20 Stephen: p)
:p
17:21 feet a-stomping
who's a-knocking
17:22 the nate a-boxing
the gnomes a-poxing
but who, pray tell
will be a mopping?
me: a pox on the elf
who came for health
17:23 i gave him ludgins
in boiler dungeons
but up he got
tit tat TOT
ahop to my door
17:24 acryin for more
sleepy-head Natty,
so sore and alone,
wanted to bless
17:25 also box the Gnome!
17:26 Stephen: and lay him to rest
in the bubble boiler room
17:27 me: but up from that tomb
the Revenant walks and stalks
through winter gloom
spying me out
with squeaky shouts
aHOO from one corner
17:28 aBOO from the street
he follows and haunts me
- the ninny Gnomic scout!

17:40 Stephen: stout with a pout
each whisker a treat

2 March 2009
17:02 Me: What did you nip on the mighty Misses-Sip?
17:10 Stephen: the smell of cow manure
a light snow
the bluffs and lots of beer

My dear Wormwood, this is funny (to us)

2009-03-02T14:45:00.001-08:00

Conversation between two Demons

"My Dear Wormwood,

Everything is clearly going very well. .... You speak of their being great laughers [these humans]. I trust this does not mean that you are under the impression that laughter as such is always in our favour. This point is worth some attention.

I divide the causes of human laughter into Joy, Fun, the Joke Proper, and Flippancy. You will see the first among friends and lovers reunited on the eve of a holiday. Among adults some pretext in the way of Jokes is usually provided, but the facility with which the smallest witticisms produce laughter at such a time shows that they are not the real cause. What that real cause is we do not know. Something like it is expressed in much of that detestable art which the humans call Music, and something like occurs in Heaven - a meaningless acceleration in the rhythm of celestial experience, quite opaque to us. Laughter of this kind does us no good and should always be discouraged. Besides, the phenomenon is of itself disgusting and a direct insult to the realism, dignity, and austerity of Hell.

Fun is closely related to Joy - a sort of emotional froth arising from the play instinct. It is very little use to us. It can sometimes be used, of course, to divert humans from something else which the Enemy [God] would like them to be feeling or doing: but in itself it has wholly undesirable tendencies; it promotes charity, courage, contentment, and many other evils.

....

The real use of Jokes or Humour is in quite a different direction, and it is specially promising among the modern generation who take their "sense of humour" so seriouisly that a deficiency in this sense is almost the only deficiency at which they feel shame. Humour is for them the all-consoling and (mark this) the all-excusing, grace of life. Hence it is invaluable as a means of destroying shame. If a man simply lets others pay for him, he is "mean"; if he boasts of it in a jocular manner and kids his friends with having been taken - he is no longer "mean" but a comic. Mere cowardice is shameful; cowardice boasted of with humourous exaggerations and grotesque gestures can be passed off as funny. Cruelty is shameful - unless the cruel man can represent it as a practical joke. A thousand bawdy, or even blasphemous, jokes do not help towards a man's damnation so much as his discovery that almost anything he wants to do can be done, not only without the disapproval but with the admiration of his fellows, if only it can get itself treated as a Joke. And this temptation can be almost entirely hidden from your patient by that modern seriousness about Humour. Any suggestion that there might be too much of it can be represented to him as "Puritanical" or as betraying a "lack of humour."

But Flippany is the best of all. In the first place it is very economical. Only a clever human can make a real Joke about virtue, or indeed about anything else; any of them can be trained to talk as if virtue were funny. Among flippant people that Joke is always assumed to have been made. No one actually makes it; but every serious subject is discussed in a manner which implies that they have already found a ridiculous side to it. If prolonged, the habit of Flippancy builds up around a man the finest armour-plating against the Enemy that I know, and it is quite free from the dangers inherent in the other sources of laughter. It is a thousand miles away from Joy: it deadens, instead of sharpening, the intellect; and it excites no affection between those who practise it."

-from Chapter XI of C.S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters

Endeavor and Play

2009-02-24T14:12:00.000-08:00

"The opposite of play isn't work. It's depression. To play is to act out and be wilful, exultant and committed as if one believes in all prospects." -Brian Sutton-Smith

He was "a staunch dissident against the view that endeavor is futile." -Tom Shippey[?], describing J.R.R. Tolkien's Christian and Germanic ethic for life's choices, which are innately heroic.

"The kids with pretend guns who pop out to shoot adults with 'Ha I shot you!' are functional happy optimists. The same adults (who will not play dead!), disturbed by kids with toy guns, are already dead to life, and ought to be shot." -NPHillman

"Polyconjugating is Polydisorienting" -NPH

"Cowardice, Cruelty, Numbness and Abasement result necessarily from the absence of Remorse and Joy." -NPH

"The fear of personal redemption and transformation is the greatest fear known to man and woman." -NPH

I Lurch

2009-02-09T09:04:00.000-08:00

I long for you along heart’s long ways.
I reach for you over the abyss,
Lurching to hear your voice
your heart
your mind

I want to wake to her,
stir her to me,
eyes wide, ears hearing.

I make believe
I make believe in great gladness
You are mine
All mine
But I embrace you,
you sectioned,
and my heart splits

I long to feel me unfettered,
feel you free
and freely,
with unhindered hands.
If only she,
unpartitioned she,
were uniquely
unduplicatably for me.

How many miles and starlodes
I strode to find her.
How long the way I'll bear her.

I want to give her me … alive
but it’s I who weekly dies.

I crouch near her sacred bed
like a child
fearful
skiddish to touch,
to touch her I touch every day,
she who stirs me,
stirs me
stirs me heart and marrow

My fullest frolick,
My rampingest romp,
My blithest bound,
My liltsomest leap,
crashes me against walls,
paralysing limbs.
Wilful walls,
fences confining willynilly
above, beside, below.

Bombwounds.

We burst for space.
We lie trapped in a narrow room
in a narrow house
in a narrow world
hunted by beasts
who live for bed, rend in bed,
raptors with prey on their beds,
rotting in beds, tickling our hearts,
beckoning with blood, false hope's blood,
hearts palpitating,
confused, wildered, wanting.
The succubuses stick stagnant on cushions of lethargy.

I long
I reach
I lurch
to live
to elope with her
into life -
The wide seawide verdure of vistas
implanted in my soul and my sky.
All the sages I’ve met and known,
Lords and ladies,
unswerving companions,
Come to us,
True counselors,
Intrepid intercessors,
Unfeigned friends.

-Nathan Hillman, Ninth of February 2009

Larik and Darik, the Oaks of Alps, and Akemantak - Softshoewood

2008-12-17T10:25:00.000-08:00

Let the larchlode lithely lead us,
the sootheshoewood pad our footpaces
tree-traced in supple snowshoetimber

LARCH: Old High German *larihha, from Latin larix (genitive laricis), probably a loan-word from an Alpine Gaulish language, corresponding phonologically to Old Celtic *darik- "oak". Darik stems from the same root as TREE itself, derived and generalised from oak-names.

Thus, *Larik- mirrored *Darik- in an ancient Celtic language. Did other tree names sound as -ARIK in alpine communities? Darik, Larik, *Barik (Oak, Larch and Birch?). A sonorant descendant of Darik is Welsh Derw (der-u), "oak", akin to Old English Treow (Tree).

Back-constructed, without the recent loan from German into English (larch < Lärche), the English word larch could have become LARROW in a straight path from Old English.

I eat yarrow under the larrow, and it warms me to my marrow. Yes, precious. I do.

North American tamarack (red larch) is likely an Algonquian loan (1805) (cf. synonymous Hackmatack, 1792, from a source akin to Abenaki Akemantak "supple wood for making snowshoes").

Larches lose their needles. They are conifers, but NOT evergreens. Magnificent.

[Help from http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?l=l, and from Me ]