Dark Sister, Dark Water, Dark Cliff, Dark Donnybrookers, Dark Giants, Dark Bull, and the Watery Fair of Rogues!

The Latvian Sisters, the Unclimbable Cliff, the Lone Jew, the Atlantean Dock, the Dark-wearing Donnybrookers, the Lavatory on the Cliff, the Twenty-Feet High Highwaymen, the Black Gaelic Bull,  the Fair of the Rovers in the Bay
 
 
Reporting a dream of height, depth, frivolity, intimacy, song, and Giant Perils


Woke and slept many times today, in which a story was woven in the waking one knows when one is asleep. I came to a seashore, a place I'd been before and often with my sisters and two parents. But family had only travelled there (so far) in my sleep. There was a great reunion along the coast, where the ocean lay to the West. We met in a lodge inside a sea-side forest of elms, oaks, hollies and beeches. There grew very few pines or evergreens - it was not the Great Northwest. Lilija Pugasevich's many sisters were there, though Lilija herself was absent. One of her sisters, unusually dark-haired, kept asking me if I would set sail and visit the Land of the Jews. Her eyes were big and sad. I told her I'd no immediate plans or ability to do so, and she walked away, downcast. Another sister with hair like the sun kept having tea with me, and we shared many stories.


Over this ocean to the West was an island or more, and peninsulas jutting further west to the north. For a look outward over the sea, I climbed up a steep rock-cliff with a loghouse on top, but the residents behaved surly and I retreated down, avoiding a glut of cars and their rubber tires rubbing the pavement into smoke and fire. I had to jump aside to avoid getting run over. I flitted northward up the coast until I came to a quay of boats and sailed west onto a strange platform at sea. We floated upon it and spent the night. But recreationalists with motorised skis kept jumping over us, sometimes landing splat on the platform while we tried to sleep. I eventually erected a tent there - similar to the one I'd laid up in in Glencolmcille Donegal in 2004 and 2010. (https://www.facebook.com/nathan.p.hillman/media_set?set=a.430408248594.199938.695643594&type=3) But I could get no sleep, and travelling Germans begged me to harbour them in my tent.


We all headed back ashore, drifting northward then west again on the south shore of Glencolmcille's peninsula. We looped around the finger until we came to Glencolmcille, where Mary O'Donnell's hostel stood on the high hilltop abandoned, and converted into a hilltop cottage lavatory and tinker's bed.


I headed for company into Glen Head Tavern where the landlady told me with goodwill,


`Careful wearing dark colours now. 'Tis a contest between all dark-haired and dark-clothed ones to knock each other cold. If you're not playin, well, just mind you might get a Ka-NOCK on the head. Careful on the road.`


I looked at my clothes and hair and realised, `I am a dark one!` Then capered up the path to the highest hilltop where Dooey Hostel once stood, and walked into the lonely lavatory. No sooner had I shut the door then a man walked in, an African.


`My friend,` I said. `You are dark as I am dark, though we are dark in different ways. Do not hurt me!`



He pulled a €10 note from his pocket, handed it to my hand and whispered,


`Take this as a sign of my peace! And in payment for interrupting you!`


I took the €10 out a backdoor onto the sheer cliff-face and looked over the 500-feet cliffs down into the sea. I ran as fast as I could back into Glen Head Tavern, €10 richer, my chest to the bar.


`You're for the pub after all?` the landlady asks. I look right and a man comes beside me and stands 20 feet high, ruddy-haired and ruddy-skinned in a ruddy-brown sweater. I nervously give the landlady my note for a drink, and she gives me *€20* in change.


`Is that enough?` she asks.


`Das reicht!` I reply, in German, because the joy of old friends and European community surged in me and I felt like leaping. `Germans say this to mean, "It's plenty!"`, I told her, and I sidle to another side of the inn. Another 20-foot donnybrooker walks inside, shot with ravenblack hair. I scamper out for a breath of stout air.


Needing some privacy again, I run at a fenced pasture, thinking how wonderful to be outdoors hidden from the eyes of priers, lookers and donnybrookers. But as I roll under the fence cables, I get entangled in the barb and nylon and fear an electric shock. `Thank goodness it's not live,` I say to myself. But once inside the pasture, I remember that Ireland is known for bulls and cattle and get too nervous. I leap over another spot of fence, only to find myself in an even narrower fenced pasture with oak-trees and oak-mast. A positively gigantic and intolerant black bull stands 50 feet away next to cows, and lowers his horns and sets straight at me!


In my dreams, quadruped bulls are my greatest enemies. His horns fly toward my ribcage and I suck in my belly and hurl down my hands upon each horn in a tight grip, arcing my body up as he heaves me upward. I fly a hundred feet through the air and land next to the Hilltop Cottage i.e. Dooey Hostel.


I bowleg my way down the wet-grass hill, crouching on the salty slick stone, till I reach the bay far below. A huge tractor ploughs the water and I hear rolling song. Every rover in Glencolmcille is on a sea-tractor, sea-boat, or sea-cattle, riding furiously in the bay while singing songs to echo in your bedroom. The Lost Fair is reinstated, as it was for the first time in 50 years in 2010 when I lived in Donegal, and now is enacted in the waters of the very ocean. The giant tractors and Clydesdales and heavy-hulled boats pull up and down the cove, ringing with the furious delight of local song.


I wake up.


I go back to sleep.


Now I'm with my father, and I tell him I've been filmed in a movie in Donegal. I set him down and begin to play for him the spools which unfold the experience of my above dream.


`Who's the protagonist?` he asks. `Are there any villains?` `Who is the forlorn woman - is she herself a Jew, a Gypsy, or one of the Dark Irish?`


I wake up and write down the dream.

Bocktanz

I got tugged, by accident of cocking my head to a far-away Irish flute, into full-blown Irish celebrations along the lake last night. My former (Céili & Step) dance teacher showed up & roped me into `The Fairy Reel`, which seemed all and not at all familiar, in front of the stage and crowd. Sizzling. Ran into former ICH'er - Armenian-Finno-Hungarian dancer I hadn't seen since 2007, who's a co-digger of roots & folk-religion: _Katholikos_. Ecumenism, Chesterton & Belloc's names came up. Rare celebrations already have a crowded company for Thursday pub. Heaven petitions were ringing. The weather was sweltering on my eskimo-body. We sweated a freak medley of capers, waltzes, polkas, reels, hambos, polskas, gangars with centrifugal force to knock down arch-enemies. I flung water off my woolly mophead-hair like a half-goat, which led to dancing circles on my hands. This mad delight is the feast after famine: What diehard folko-philes feel, daily blared by Brainwash Babel Noise, when the public host traditional music for a single hour. I'd no idea the event was on - but I got there the same way all the children got into Pied Piper's magic mountain. By following the pipe out of town. Leaving the nuclear for the extended family. Hail the Piper! Down with Puritans.

Lemonsnort Your Mansniffle

Hamdy Kassem,   أنت المنقذ



The Bedouin lemon-snort

is curing my mancold

while boiling under hot beams, sun-melting my mansniffle,

burning off the achy icky summerflu,

mansummer-summerman-flu.

Cheers, you unsnotting noggin on my neck,

you brainsoothing mucilage smooth,

with windy weather blowing my cup

steaming up

my pine-cone tea, spruce-cone fir-cone

resin-sticky in ginger-lemon-yarrow

in my binger-Bedouin marrow,

my rising man-might,

slaking my lemon-stung nostril.

Fire-Worked Up

It was a strange day. It was the Fourth of July, a day when people ferment, foam at the mouth and talk to strangers.

The first stranger to chat me up insisted my bike was too heavy for me to carry. But he was racing by in a machine on four wheels and somehow unable to lend a hand. The second stranger, because I was sitting bare-chested next to a lake, tapped me on my shoulder,

`Yo Bruce Banner!` {Hulk's alter ego}

The third stranger was a Staffordshire Bull Terrier and nearly put its owner in the lake in its desire to sniff my journal. The Bull languished and looked back as the man manhandled him away.

The fourth stranger didn't come till I'd nearly carried home a 6' long dresser weighing about 120 lbs. I was unscrewing a flappy hinged door to throw that away when I heard,

`You're almost there! Keep screwing! You got it!`

I look up. `This is a good day to talk to strangers. People must be early drunk.`

He runs up at this point, tall and ruddy with blonde buzzed hair. `Can I help with the screws?`
`Sure,` handing him a screwdriver. `Any good at carrying heavy dressers? You're not too tipsy yet, right?`

`Naah.` He screws one of the screws back in.

`I'm actually trying to unscrew the whole door.`

`Oh! You should have told me!`

_You mean 3 seconds ago?_ But I didn't say anything and he was unable to get the screws out since the screwdriver was too short.

`Can I help you carry it?`

Once inside, we carry the thing up eight flights of stairs. At this stage, he seems to twig he's a stranger in a strange house, but keeps up the farmboy politeness as I lead him back out.

`When I saw you there, I knew I had to help you!`

Partly thanks to a boozy stranger, Bruce Banner didn't have to get all Hulk on that dresser today (see attached photo).

The Pied Piper of Hamlin

My message, put too vague in my previous post, overlaps with things Edward Hamiton communicated with me about cosmetic attempts to defy aging or airbrush oneself with an appearance of plastic youth. My thesis here joins with his, since it stands in mocking amazement at an entire culture's avoidance of or glossing over of aging and death (cryonics being the dead-end of such obsessions). I don't wish to misapply Freudian terms, but *obsession* (not mentioned above) figures centrally in my understanding of how the body is ... compartmentalised and delinked from the human being. I'm not letting global cultures off the hook in this regard, but I'm aiming my DARTS now at the very recent trend in Anglo and American world power, uncoincidentally coupled with Modernity (1820s - Present), in which the Body only ever exists in polarities. People (me included) never find a 'middle-ground' for Nature or the body - because our society never groundworked any ground in the middle. All ground is forced to the edges. Standing 'between things' means for us taking extreme sides, or reacting to the poles themselves, thus shunting you mercilessly to yet another pole. With something as culturally aged, forgotten and inconvenient as ... Your Very Own Body (!), Modernists did not know what to do but to start killing people with electric chairs and gas-chambers in their terror of crunching bones or pouring blood. So afraid of the Body had they become. And the poor children! The children, like separate non-human creatures because they're not adults (no, not allowed!), these amputated kids & teens absorb and court some occult Adult world by playing doctor and hiding everything they do in the barnyard until they finally leave Body-taboos behind to become the raving psycho adults their parents were, rushing marriage (or free-love!) because they had no outlet for eating, drinking, sleeping, or pursuing their sexual love in peace, moderation, sacredness, adult morale, and commitment. There is no extended communal family to foster any integration of the body. You are stuck with people too biologically close to you to receive any real comfort or guidance. You need bredth and distance, but shall not get it. The kids therefore have to martyr their bodies all alone, like jilted bulemics, throughout puberty itself, ruining the greatest discovery period of their lives, then later joining ranks with the half-imagined world of their betters in which they themselves, locked and jailed inside the xenophobic Nuclear Family, toss aside the Old Grandparents and corral (with steel cables!) the next group of Little Innocent Kids, and disrespect everyone's body around them. You see - you must shun your yucky body or just go nuts with it, breaking every law! Thou Shalt Not receive any Middle Ground. Everyone has a gross yucky body, a body very awkward to deal with. The body in this culture of physical debasement always comes compartmentalised, non-integrated with the mind, with the heart, with one's convictions, with morality. The body in this culture is a riddle for moral law instead of a reason for the same moral law to protect throughout larger, integrated multi-generations. At the root of these harmful Modernist obsessions, speeding arrows stray of any target, is the Adult World, 'sensational', occult, segmented from the 'Pure Child's' world. All the ridiculous and life-segmenting values of the bourgeois Modernist Protestants and/or Atheists hemmed the poor Child in like a paralysing Idyll. Puritanical society fears 'corruption of our poor poor kids' (!) above all things, making `The Pied Piper of Hamlin` the most terrifying fairy-tale known in America. This gross 'ex-corporalising' of one's own offsprings or life-pupils is a deeply anti-body tradition (strangely overlapping with ritual school spankings, taboo school sex-fetishes, bodily sadistic teachers and headmasters and parents.)

It's not so much that Anglos & Americans simply do 'transgressive things' with the body - it's that they have compartmentalised the body and grown up obsessing about it like a sundered finger or an ear they lost as a child, or which some rule forbad them use for touching or hearing (!). All this loss and taboo and discomfort and the making 'gross' of things sacred and ancient, results in only one thing: The body as a disjointed, disfigured object like a project for a cosmetologist, per Ed's perceptive paragraph. The nuclear family, the Modern Nuclear Family (who controls the world in a material empire), is overly protective by nature since it's too narrow and small a social group to feel secure. The empire is materially strong, socially very weak. It looks out over its vista of materials it needs to continue this flawed experiment in unnatural consumption and child-rearing. You see, the tiny tiny nuclear family must protect ....the Children! Those innocent Children! Insidiously, for those who grow up inside this world, those people never get a sky-view of the amputation of their very body-heart-selves as they grow into 'Adults'. You grow up with your body, and with the body of your friend nearby, or that of your mother, or your bride hoped-to-be, but you are told you must amputate your body from your career, from your routine, from your relationships, and (most importantly) you must privatise any of those more 'gross things' like too much focus on food, sleep, exercise, sex, helping the sick, or easing and honouring and communalizing the passage of the dying/dead.

What is left when one is forced to amputate one's own body - only this: A lot posturing on a stage. A lot of acting. All this grossness (magical miraculous nature made 'gross'!), all this unholiness is perfect material for the Modern artist's templates. In a world grown unfeeling and deadened, things like bleeding or digesting food or reproduction or giving birth become sizzly sensations on the artist's lurid stage. Life itself is not respected - so of course Dying and Death are not either.

The Body

The material world and your body, your own body, is not amoral. It is not morally neutral. Any way of teaching/culture which makes you forget, cancel or denigrate your own body makes you half alive and half dead. It makes you a harmer. It makes you spit on precious things. It is deeply anti-Judaic and anti-Jesus, and anti nearly every aged belief on earth. Making the body second-rate kills your senses, stealing from you your passion and com-passion. Do not segment, censor, kill, debase, mock, or belittle your body or the body of any(one)(thing) else. The body is sacred. You are lost, every step of the way you neglect it. I aim these words at everyone, me included, but mainly at America and Britain - for you have forgotten the truth of your ancestors, you have walked over the bodies of your shamed and slain, and tortured the dignity of millions. I respect you in much else, and have learned much from you. Stop killing the body. I am not ashamed of my body, and shall uphold and dignify the body of my neighbour, my friend, the cosmos and my enemy. I am not ashamed of the body of life made by my Maker, or by any other originator. No more debasing, no more fragmentation, no more disrespect, no more execration. The unholiness of neglecting the body ends here, from my heart to my finger to my pen.

Fraternal, Extraterral

DREAM - 26 April 2014: I wandered up and down stone stairs at UW-Madison, wanting a grassy spot for a picnic. All university buildings now connected, bridged one to the next with zigging, zagging steps & passage-ways. I walked onto a green and sat by a rectangular flower-bed to relax.

A mixed fraternity sorority crowd, usually classist & uppity, see me and surprise me by sitting down indian-sty...le all around me and the garden space. I'm baffled to notice I'm buff naked (how did this happen?), and so I try to be casual and pretend it's the most normal thing in the world. I take a long, dignified pull at a drink in my hand.

A girl sits down close and explains, `Hey, we saw you and couldn't pass you up. So why are you naked?`

`Well I don't really *know* ... you know?` I figure the honest approach has its cuteness.

She giggles.

`Do you know why you're dressed?` I ask, to the clapping approval of the entire group.

`No idea,` she answers. To my disconsolation, no one follows my lead.

We sit joking and talking, as I discreetly put on articles of clothing I pull from my rucksack. This way, I go from being naked to dressed without anyone noticing.

Right?

The girl and I go off for a stroll, up and down the zigzagging stairs. `Ever been this way before?` she asks me. We tiptoe down a very steep and roofed stair with lateral guards, me first, holding hard on the rails. Suddenly, the roof and railing end. It's now nothing but a bare stair falling like a ladder from the sky, high above the earth. I turn around and look at her, a bit sheepishly,

`I think we oughtta go back. Are there any safer stairs down?`

END OF DREAM

Come, I will cult-lead you

 

I'm writing an alliterating and rhyming manual on how to tutor. It incorporates holistic, libertarian pedagogy exercised on private land. Embark upon environmental, personal, higher-risk learning with ropes, pulleys, bowdrills, cliff-side & tree-branch recitations, oral tradition in blindfolds, manual rock transport, & multilingual water immersion. You will multi-task during all activities, shifting organically between interrelated skill-sets. You will be physically and mentally exposed to alternating environments and multidimensional situations. As you synergistically work, your physical, mental and spiritual health will grow supple, vibrant, adaptable, integrated, and non-assuming. Your educators and audience consist exclusively of bona fide friends. Each day will be summarised before sleep -- Symbolically, demonstratively re-enacted in front of a communal fire. Everything will be recorded, then dramatically re-staged in front of everyone at least twice. Nothing will be confidential. There will be no such thing as not offering your own opinion. All arrangements will be non-professional. All rights to safety and not falling in love will be waived.

You're Supposed to Be Overwhelmed

It seems like, whether it's God or 'the Universe' or 'Self', life itself is too much for everyone. Good, happy fortune will topple your equilibrium just as ruthlessly as bad fortune. And being in the middle will drive you nuts too. Each one is overwhelmed by fear, happiness, sadness, hope, disappointment. The best we can do is stop pretending we are ... alone. Being overwhelmed and overawed does not happen in isolation. Don't be snookered. You're not an autonomous, individualistic soldier.

Awe and Fainting

Dreamed I was at a banqueting table with long-missed friend, Eadweard. When I tried to embrace him he staggered backward in awe, shouting, `The Grace of the Lord Most High!` Then he fell flat to the ground. Amazed, I stooped, lifted him up saying, `No, it's just me` & tried to hug him to comfort. He stumbled backwards again, a look of overjoyed awe on his face. With hands raised he tumbled back to the ground. Again I lifted him up, tried to take his hand. It fell away trembling as we went around the whole long banquet table with him backing up shouting, `The Grace of the Lord Most High! The Grace of the Lord Most High!` {Dreamt 6 January 2014}

Past the Poles

We don't want women. We don't want men. We want interactive women and men.

We don't want hard workers. We don't want hard players. We want people of lasting intimacy.

We don't want vacation. We don't want overtime. Every hour is holy.

We don't want recreation. We don't want boredom. We want delight in each other's presence.

We don't want 0-tolerance. We don't want payback. We'll take things with a grain of salt.

We don't want Black. We don't want White. We want everything inbetween.

We don't want surface. We don't want varnish. We want everything underneath.

We don't want Victorian. We don't want skank. We want a giving lover.

We don't want silence. We don't want talk. We want bonding.

We don't want puritans. We don't want debauch. We want people making pleasure.

We don't want to conserve. We don't want to rebel. We want things that matter to last.

We don't want to compete. We don't want to stagnate. We want things that matter to last.

We don't want slavery. We don't want free. We want privacy to make moral choices.

We don't want war. We don't want peace. Our lives surpass your state.

We don't want life. We don't want death. We want you not to fear them.

We don't want to work. We don't want to retire. We want a life worth working and spending for.

We don't want Republicans. We don't want Democrats. We want our neighbours in office.

We don't want condemners. We don't want avoiders. We want leaders who face our face.

We want leaders who relate to people. We want governments who love the world.

We don't want Team A. We don't want Team B. Learn to play ball with F.

We don't want your goals. We don't want your data. We want your living soul.

We don't want security. We don't want control. We will risk the unexpected.

We don't want growth. We don't want markets. We want new seed every Spring.  

                        ~NpH

You're Not a Self, You Silly Elf

`Self-discovery` is a mutual, mirroring act. The self can see the self, to a degree, better than another can, but not without the mirror of the Other. Self is not a reference point for itself. Insofar as it is, it's equally a reference point for Other. Self exists only with recourse to an entity outside of itself which interacts and overlaps with it. If self interacts only with Self, there is no awareness, identity, unity or evolution. In real life, there is division, there is unity: Without the one, you cannot have the other. The joy of unity is meaningless if there can be no mystic mingling between related but simultaneously distinct selves. Absolute selfhood is a delusion, a blindness to Self and Other, a distortion of reality. It is not only because of communities that we see or have Self. And yet we cannot see or have Self without other intercoursing selves.

Brought to you by another Quiet Sunday Evening.

~NpH