Corn wave swarming with ravens. Which heaven’s blue? Below? Above? Later arrow, that sped out from the soul. Stronger whirring. Nearer glowing. Two worlds touching.
Good to hear Ann ap read it in the original German. Danke
Asked if it meant that someone in Wales was walking around completely immune to cancer, Prof Sewell said: “Possibly. This immune cell could be quite rare, or it could be that lots of people have this receptor but for some reason it is not activated. We just don’t know yet.”
Immune cell that kills most cancers discovered by accident by British scientists https://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2020/01/20/immune-cell-kills-cancers-discovered-accident-british-scientists/?WT.mc_id=tmg_share_tw via @TelegraphSci
From ‘On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense.’
Who Targeted Ukraine Airlines Flight 752? | Defend Democracy Press http://www.defenddemocracy.press/who-targeted-ukraine-airlines-flight-752/
They appeared on January 9th, in an Instagram account called ‘Rich Kids of Tehran‘. Quinn asks how the Rich Kids happened to be in “a low-income housing estate on the city’s outskirts [near the airport] at 6 a.m. on the morning of January 8th with cameras pointed at the right part of the sky in time to capture a missile hitting a Ukrainian passenger plane…?”
Have we been deceived yet again!
Nietzsche: Only through forgetfulness can man ever achieve the illusion of possessing a “truth”
Powerful, insightful words (on many levels) by Rilke from ‘Sonnets to Orpheus’ (1922) …
“In spite of all the farmer’s work and worry, he can’t reach down to where the seed is slowly transmuted into summer.
The earth bestows.”
Wrote William Blake, as he worked on his epic poem called Jerusalem or ‘Albion’ between 1804 -20.
I wonder what epic he would be working on if he lived today?
Jesus and his hero Los had to face the depredations of ” religion hid in war” (nothing really changes does it). People worshipped Satan disguised as ‘God,’ murdering Jesus and his message of forgiveness when they promoted war in his name.
The established churches were content to promote “war and princedom and victory.”
Blake’s response? “Their God I will not worship in their churches” … cries Los ...”O Sons we live not by wrath, by mercy alone we live.”
And in 1813 Shelley wrote in his ‘Queen Medb’ of a giant oak!
‘Thus have I stood, -through a wild waste of years
Struggling with whirlwinds of mad agony,
Yet peaceful, and serene, and self-enshrined,
Mocking my powerless tyrant’s horrible curse
With stubborn and unalterable will,
Even as a giant oak, which heaven’s fierce flame
Had scathèd in the wilderness, to stand
A monument of fadeless ruin there;
Yet peacefully and movelessly it braves
The midnight conflict of the wintry storm,
As in the sunlight’s calm it spreads
Its worn and withered arms on high
To meet the quiet of a summer’s noon …
And the fair oak, whose leafy dome affords
A temple where the vows of happy love
Are registered, are equal in thy sight;
No love, no hate thou cherishest; revenge
And favoritism, and worst desire of fame
Thou knowest not; all that the wide world contains
Are but thy passive instruments, and thou
Regard’st them all with an impartial eye,
Whose joy or pain thy nature cannot feel,
Because thou hast not human sense,
Because thou art not human mind …
A shrine is raised to thee …
If you will go down into yourself, under your surface personality you will find you have a great desire to drink life direct from the source, not out of bottle and bottled personal vessels …
Life from the source, unadulterated with the human taint …
The cool, cool truth of pure vitality pouring into the veins from the direct contact with the source. Uncontaminated by even the beginning of a lie …
And the passion of truth is the embrace between man and his god in the sheer coition of the life-flow, stark and unlying.
(from ‘The Primal Passions’ D H Lawrence b. 1885)
Osip Mandelstam (b. 1891) celebrates the primal passions in his ‘Silentium‘
She has not yet been born: she is music and word, and therefore the un-torn, fabric of what is stirred.
Silent the ocean breathes. Madly day’s glitter roams. Spray of pale lilac foams, in a bowl of grey-blue leaves.
May my lips rehearse the primordial silence, like a note of crystal clearness, sounding, pure from birth!
Stay as foam Aphrodite – Art – and return, Word, where music begins: and, fused with life’s origins, be ashamed heart, of heart!
THE FUGITIVE STAG – Long is the destitute ‘Age of the World’s Night’ – A night that is spreading its darkness.
We live in an age when the traditional gods are no longer able to gather people unto themselves, with the consequence that human history is changed forever. The gods have fled. The One God still reigns – for many! But for others the divine radiance is extinguished in human history. And the tragedy is that mortals do not even realize what they have lost. But this ‘Age of Darkness’ can become a ‘Holy Night’ if some would only realize the predicament of ‘the absence’.
The ‘Turning of the Age’ is the responsibility, neither of a renewed god of old nor of a new one bursting onto the scene. The gods can no longer do everything. The responsibility rests with mortals, and this ‘turning’ entails, at the outset, reaching into the abyss to rediscover the essence of what it means to be human. Once recovered, maybe some of the gods and goddesses will return? And to where would such a deity ‘re-turn-to’? To the right place at the right time where people are ready to welcome them to their new home.
According to Holderlin, the only mortals who are up for the task are poets – people in the creative arts. It is they who, being able to grasp ‘the absence’, become aware of a new presence. It is they, who having faced the abyss, comes to know the marks or traces of the fugitive gods and goddesses. By following ‘the traces’ our contemporary ‘creatives’ (as I call them) can help kindred souls to also know the way to The Turning.
The closer the poet draws toward midnight, the greater the terror of destitution. Not only could the holy track towards new deities be lost, but also the traces we follow could also be obscured, and even obliterated, by history.
But ‘the creatives’ see hope in the terror of destitution, forever striving to attend to, and celebrate, the traces of the fugitive goddess.
‘I raise this greenery to my lips –’ (Osip Mandelstam)
I raise this greenery to my lips –
these leaves glued into an oath –
with the perjurous earth that bore snowdrops,
mother of the maples and oaks.
Watch me grow strong and blind,
as I follow these humble roots.
What a park! My eyes come alive
now thunder is passing through.
Like beads of mercury, frogs
make a globe of voices, linked together;
branches form from twigs
and a milky figment from cold breath.
30 April 1937
Mandelstam once wrote – I am both a gardener and a flower I am, too;
In the prison of the world, I am not alone.
PLEASE ARRANGE 2020 SUMMER CAMPS IN SIBERIA SUPPORTING NIKITA AND HIS FAMILY …
Scientist moved to Siberia to stop the thawing of permafrost https://mol.im/a/7886461 via @Femail
Sergey was one of the first geo-physicists to alert the world to the dangers of permafrost thawing.
The Fugitive Stag 