A Gale of Goidelic

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

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The Identity Crisis of Mouse

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

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

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 !

".... 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

"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

"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

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}