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NULLE BASTARDO CARBURENDUM
Nature deplores a void, sometimes mercifully so.
With my surrender to photographic accursedness – a lifetime of bad-karma disasters ranging from the fire through various ripoffs – purposeful photography is now seemingly gone forever from my life. This means much of the time I hitherto filled with visual thinking has become an emptiness of mirrors that reflect only dwindling light, the mental equivalent of some darkening hollow randomly spanned by firefly sparks of passing thought and the echoes of ambient music.
I sit at my desk; I lose myself watching a city-fat squirrel, acrobatic master of the cedars adjacent my living-room window. I struggle to think in words not pictures; I work at seining phrases from the Sargasso Sea of my dyslexic mind. (What I will write for Sunday's blog?) The clock above my bookshelves ticks ominously: my resident Metro Gnome, forever marking the artificial rhythm of urban life. (With which new atrocity shall I lead “Nulle Bastardo Carburendum”?) The exhaust fan drones softly in my bedroom. (What of the past week's Internet writing should I include in “Dialogues”?)
The television, tuned to a cable music station, interjects an instrumental version of an old and profoundly moving song of rebellion. First it distracts me from the unfolding epic of treachery and betrayal that is our national requiem. Then quite uncharacteristically it prompts my mind to sing its chorus:
Glory O, glory O, to the bold Fenian men.
And I cannot but wonder: will there be a Resistance to capitalism as there was to the tyrannies that preceded it? If there is, will the future honor its heroines and heroes? Will the future sing such songs as the present now sings to honor the freedom-fighters of our past?
Glory O, glory O, to the bold Fenian men.
Alas I have forgotten the rest of the words; it has been long years since I was a singer. I go to the Internet to remember. There I find work by a group called Omnia, a YouTube video that magically transforms my entire afternoon and evening.
Omnia not only sings and plays the best rendition of this song I have ever heard; the accompanying illustrations glow with the same exquisitely haunting Celtic light that enchanted me at first sight and bound me ever after to the Pacific Northwest.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMGCs4qbmHA
But who is this Omnia and why have I never heard of them until now?
To learn more, I chose another of their songs from the YouTube catalogue. Because it is called “The Elven Lover,” I anticipate a variant of English ballad called “The Daemon Lover,” about a legendary seducer named James Harris:
What hills, what hills are those my love
Those hills so dark and low
Those are the hills of hell my love
Where you and I must go...
I click on “The Elven Lover.” What I hear astounds me. It is the quaintly tender song many of us know as “Scarborough Fair,” but Omnia sings the real words, which I'll warrant most of us have never heard:
Tell her to plow it with a dandelion sword
parsley sage rosemary and thyme
and sow the fields with spirits unborn
if she would be a true-love of mine...
Tell her to find me when the Banshee sings
parsely sage rosemary and thyme
then fly to me on angel's wings
and she will be a true-love of mine.
(Those of us familiar with such things will instantly recognize the song's breathtakingly ancient pagan origins: as a lay of calendar and plant magic, a dialogue between a poet – a bard – and the Goddess as Muse.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNajUkcGr9M&feature=related
There is also this, for those of us willing to acknowledge our kinship with wolves:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cq_VeUMtyzU&feature=related
Then this, “Mabon” or “She is dying,” the pagan name for the autumnal equinox, by far the most poignant of the turning points of the year:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ7osoZZsRk&feature=related
And finally a piece called “Bran” leaves me with the almost eerie sense Omnia, thousands of miles and an ocean's breadth away (and despite the fact its members are at least three decades younger than I), shares many of my own insights about the present-day relevance of Celtic mythology. Bran is Bendegeid Vron, a tree-god, the only male divinity with whom I have ever felt an iota of closeness. His totems are the red alder and Raven, both of which are as abundant in the Pacific Northwest as they were in ancient Britain. He is a savior, a Bronze-Age incarnation of the dying god, the once-and-future king, a son of the Goddess and a pre-Christian Messiah to the Brythons. His story, contained in the Mabinogeon and beautifully fictionalized by Evangeline Walton in The Children of Llyr, is an epic of tragic heroism, and because it does not deny the sacredness of sexual love, I find it infinitely more meaningful than the tale of the misogynistic anti-sex Jesus.
To the best of my knowledge – and I pay close attention to such things – Omnia is the only musical group to have ever granted Bran any recognition, all the more astonishing given his sacred wood was anciently made into whistles and Pan-pipes, which means today he would be hailed as Lord of Flautists and Woodwinds had we retained our ancestors' pagan sensibilities. Omnia's composition is haunting: it calls to mind the Birds of Rhiannon, who are pivotal in the Bran epic and whose song is said to be the most exquisite music in the universe; its flutes and drums bring back a cherished scene from my youth, women dancing naked in a moonlit meadow, their upflung arms and arched backs and swirling hair resurrecting choreographies unseen since the sack of Knossos; its power is that of some troutly river, clean and clear and cleansing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ed3rUaJIrfc&feature=related
So went the remainder of the afternoon, all of it given over to exploring the works of Omnia and discovering to my huge vexation most of their work cannot be purchased in the United States – with the two available CDs effectively censored by prohibitive pricing. Obviously someone somewhere thinks Omnia's visions are too dangerous for Moron Nation audiences.
Then, because it was among the Omnia selections, I discovered a group called Faun, also European, not just akin to Omnia in form and content but creators of the most unabashedly pagan music I have ever heard, echoes of the lost age of matriarchy, the forbidden geopolitical reality of all human history save the last maybe 4000 years:
No man shall scratch runes
Not being able to use them well;
Many a man is misled
by dark forces...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgGIOZiVCVU&feature=related
An approximate translation of the words (the language is not given but I'm guessing it's some variant of Old Norse) is here:
http://lyricstranslate.com/en/egil-saga-egil-sega.html
And here's a video Faun made to tell the story:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6oYmc9WTdSs&feature=related
Meanwhile the drumbeat and the chanting is evocative beyond description. It makes me think of where the Counterculture might have gone musically, had we not been interdicted by the Ruling Class. Where indeed we were going, witness Tim Buckley's immortal tribute to the Muse:
Tell me a lie I'll cry for you
Tell me of sin and I'll laugh
Tell me of all the pain you've had
I'll never smile again.
*****
DIALOGUES
Mention of the Ruling Class brings us back to grim reality. Common Dreams has a piece that despite the weasel-wording of compulsive liberal and chronic Obamanoid John Nichols says all that need be said: Barack the Betrayer is negotiating a deal with Republicans that will savage those of us dependent on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. I respond by suggesting two terrible possibilities that would explain the present impasse.
One is that the Ruling Class has intended for a long while to force the government into default and crash the global economy. As in every economic collapse, it would give those with real money a huge boost in power, in this instance a means of leveraging a buy-back of U.S. debt from China. It would also provide an easy way to exterminate a huge number of “unprofitables” – people in my socioeconomic circumstances – without suffering the international embarrassment of death camps.
The second possibility is that the Betrayer – who seems to lie more glibly than any politician in my lifetime – never intended to be more than a one-term president: that he will finish the job Wall Street hired to do, then – when it is clear his unpopularity gives him no chance for re-election – decline to run for a second term.
If these events come to pass, please remember where you read of them first.
Meanwhile here is the full text of my Common Dreams commentary:
What if the intention of the capitalist Ruling Class is to force the United States into default, thereby crashing the global economy -- and enabling the capitalists to use their unfathomably huge cash surplus to buy back the U.S. debt from China?
It's not as far fetched as it sounds.
The New York Times reported yesterday (21 July) that "hedge funds are stockpiling cash so they can buy up United States debt if other investors flee." Which offers a plausible explanation for why the tycoons of Wall Street (and Big Business in general) – though awash in cash – refuse to invest in Main Street jobs.
If this is indeed the corporate aristocracy's intention, the investor-flight triggered by default could clear the way for the United States government literally becoming a wholly-owned subsidiary of the for-profit financial powers.
Meanwhile there's no question the unprecedented cash surplus provides the capability.
Combine capability with intention, and we have an explanation why Congress -- which has dropped all pretense of representing Main Street Americans -- seems determined to inflict default no matter what.
Is there really a fight over the deficit? Or is what we are witnessing merely another charade as described by Bill Moyers? (For the Moyers hypothesis -- that nothing is left of our constitutional democracy but theatrical concealment of tyranny -- see http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/blog/2009/07/bill_moyers_michael_winship_so.html)
And what of Barack the Betrayer, who now stands revealed as determined to destroy Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid (and thus to exterminate millions of elderly, disabled and chronically impoverished people)?
What if he accomplishes his goal – which (we can no longer doubt) is the total destruction of the New Deal socioeconomic safety net – and then smugly announces he will not run again? What if his entire 2012 candidacy is yet another Big Lie.
After all, in a single term Barack the Betrayer will have given the Ruling Class everything it wanted. He will have utterly destroyed the America President Franklin Delano Roosevelt created to head off a Communist revolution. The nation in which my generation came of age and grew to maturity will but a fading memory.
We are already being tyrannized by the same sort of capitalist governance that hitherto was characteristic only of the Third World: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation and genocidal poverty for all the rest of us. Indeed this is the New Paradigm of government at every level – local, state and federal.
Is this in fact the “change” Wall Street hired the Betrayer to impose?
As default grows ever closer – as those of us who are elderly or disabled or hopelessly impoverished now live in growing terror of being murdered by loss of our Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid – it appears ever more likely the answer to this dreadful question is “yes”: that the Betrayer is simply doing the job he was paid to do.
If he then resigns (as that earlier betrayer Lyndon Baines Johnson did over Vietnam), Barack the Betrayer will pay no penalty at all. And his party of 'Rats will thus be freed to claim the Obama presidency was all a great mistake.
Is Moron Nation truly that gullible? Just ask Madison Avenue: “Burning coal fights global warming five ways.”
As always under capitalism, it's ultimately about multiplication of profit and elimination of the unprofitable...no matter who is killed or otherwise victimized by the process.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/07
(A much shorter version of my comment appeared in The New York Times of 21 July; it is comment number 250 on the thread linked here, for which free registration may be required: http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2011/07/21/business/economy/wall-st-makes-fallback-plans-for-debt-crisis.html?sort=oldest&offset=11)
***
Two friends and I were among the approximately 2700 volunteers who visited local congressional and senatorial offices throughout the United States last Tuesday as part of Jane Hamsher's FireDogLake campaign to protect Social Security and Medicare. The following is excerpted from my after-action report:
Three of us tried to visit the Tacoma office of Sen. Patty Murray (D/WA), which much to our surprise was not just closed but apparently was never intended as anything more than politically expedient deception: the illusion of a local address.
We also visited the Tacoma offices of Rep. Norm Dicks (D/WA) and Sen. Maria Cantwell (D/WA), where we spoke with staffers and left signed copies of a letter based on Jane Hamsher's "Sample Script.”
Murray's office is apparently nothing more than a mail-drop and a voicemail service – no evidence of staffing. Nevertheless, following posted instructions, we slipped our letters beneath the locked door.
The visits to Dicks and Cantwell were low-keyed and uneventful, though Dicks' people were already employing the newest Big Lie – "strengthen Social Security" – to cover the proposed savaging of stipends.
Nevertheless the staffers with whom we spoke – an elderly African-American man at Cantwell's place and two younger white men at Dicks' – were polite and respectful.
They also assured us our written statements would be passed on to their respective bosses.
Had there been more advance notice, we no doubt could have mustered a substantially greater number of participants.
Our letter – each of us gave the staffers a signed copy – stated “I will not vote for you if you support any plan to cut Social Security or Medicare benefits.”
The FDL link is here:
http://fdlaction.firedoglake.com/
***
The other major Internet discussion in which I participated last week was a lively, mostly intelligent exploration of one of the myriad ways our dreadful “health care” system victimizes those of us who are dependent on for-profit insurance. Here is my main contribution:
Ms. Poole describes perfectly the predatory function of the capitalist "health-insurance" scam – the for-profit death-panels from which (thanks to Barack the Betrayer and the ReplicRats) – there is no longer any rational hope of escape.
What we have instead, cleverly disguised as "health care," is a system of socioeconomic cleansing without death camps – already a documented 40,000 women, children and men knowingly killed every year by denial of insurance and insurance claims.
Factor in the impending destruction of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, the number of slain will skyrocket. It's the new paradigm of capitalist governance in the United States: extermination for anyone who is elderly, disabled, chronically unemployed or otherwise deemed no longer profitable – that is, no longer exploitable for profit.
But none dare call it genocide...much less admit it's an ultimate revelation of what capitalism is really about.
*****
Blessings, like spells and litanies, are governed by the Rule of Threes. Hence to close – and perhaps to wash away some our sadness at the death of our republic – here is another selection from Omnia's work:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDTnegJvB3I&feature=related
And two more from Faun:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mty9TEmdfc&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URmxPVtlDhk&feature=related
I do not doubt this is the music of the future. It is the music of the forest and the water-meadow and the tall stones beyond. It is not dependent on internal-combustion engines or cell-phones.
Nor can I forget how the bold minstrels of the Middle Ages kept our pagan legacy alive throughout the Burning Times and all the other years of theocratic darkness. Such wisdom is older than oppression. Quoth the I Ching: “Thus one learns the sayings of antiquity and the deeds of the past, strengthening one's character thereby.”
LB/24 July 2011
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