Keep the opposition alive in you, for it is your resistance to world that makes world come alive and sustain its dynamic quality. Severity is a gift to those in lazy need of rebuke for what they careless sow. Intensity, fueled by proper disgust, hatred even, of all that is ill and poor in the world, gives focus, and sustains drive. To rebuke is to push back the thickets that would surround and choke you out. To live life as a stand for those principles which differentiate one from the dominant unthought of the age is a claim to true nobility. Respect naught that deserves not respect. In speaking truth to behavior, you honor the one dishonored by their own misbehavior. Keep hearty touch with the dirty, imperfect world, for its flaws shall inspire your ire and stoke your fires to some reach beyond, where steps ahead you may lead the race, however humble, in your intrepid, defiant advance.
How easy to be choked in mire, drowned in the swamp of easy mediocrity! How easy to sink to the level of living for nothing, speaking only that which has before been said, an easy, herdlike going along with what all else nod in an age of indistinction and colorless corruption. But that which opposes stands up, and speaks, for intelligently refined, it is the oil that feeds the fire in the belly, there where Vindler speaks wisdom in the gut.
Are you important? For what call did you birth forth in blood and amniotic ocean into perilous and strange world made from the bones and blood of ancient monsters? That call is a debt your deeds must e'er repay. For your very presence feeds upon the planet, and if you are to be more than a mouth for fodder, then let what comes out of that mouth, and let those limbs fed on fodder, speak for something more divine than the mere being here, but something deeper, more profound! For nobility is not had without cost ; easy it is to slip from courtesy. Easy it is to let selfishness immatured usurp the quality of one's inborn kindness, making brute to fit a rough world, coming back alone with blows instead of mallets with which to polish. For roughness lies ready for our ready making, if we will take up tool with ready wit and work. The shaping work of the Gods is not yet done, awaiting only our limbs to willful heed the call, and find that special shaping only we can carve. It is certain that the world's ferocity and overwhelmed wave of ongoing immense shall wipe with scoffing hands of erasure whatever we seek to impress upon its even humble parts, such that creation is a struggle to etch upon the magma flows whatever imprint we can desperate and at times random manage. Life must be deliberate, or it is soon merely species of storm, swept up within, merely a moment in the senseless drift, and to go beyond this, one must summon up and gather such piercing spear of force within that one may penetrate the very fogs with one's indomitable will.
It is the chance to grapple you have been given, from Gods grown master through the grapple, against unbeatable, or so seeming, odds. This whole array of endless black, this fire-studded theatre of stuff, this march of titans tumbling watery and cold through the great expanse, is monstrous and strange, and swallowed, it swallows, while one may grant it worth alone through struggle, which pits one's smallest will against its awesome immense ; and for such a gamble, even the Giants nod begrudging admiration. So the Gods will grant greater merit. You have rushed wind-tunnel and wild into a hopeless space, the odds all aligned against you, so gull, wings whipped back and buffet by the hurricane, with what courage will you meet the feary fate? Such merit shall you win utter with audacity.
For that it is, it ought? What cowards utter such feeble squeaks eked from bedlam? For that it is, it shall become, and I, I might be gifted such honor as to be one of many who shapes that very happening! There is one we love! Not one who cowers slavish before whatever simple happens to present itself! Seek out, and let ears hold the secret yet manifest truth : there is meaning in heroic defiance. This world was not meant to be bowed to, but enjoyed through the prayer of adventure, which is its own species of complex worship, one thrown down gauntlet with eager and earnest dialectic.
One thing the Gods will give you, no matter what pain you may be subjected to in this life, is the opportunity to experience beauty. They have gone to great pains to interweave this often-monstrous world -- where the insurmountable often weighs against the good odds -- with beauties of various and rich kinds.
The opportunity is there. The question is whether we will take it. That we will experience pain and difficulties is, unfortunately, one of the facts of the pre-Ragnarok world in the Axe Age. Yet within it all, what we come here for is beauty.
It is important to take the time to experience and appreciate that beauty, and to give thanks for it. For with all the bitter, melancholic experiences handed to us, there is, through it all, great, poignant beauty.
In fact, we need the Gods for this as well, because sometimes the beauty of life is so strong and overpowering that it can feel like it could crush it. We must worship, and give back, and express that beauty, in whatever way we can, artistic or not, in order for beauty to have life-bearing effects. For beauty is power. It is the power of the Gods. I am not discussing formal qualities of attractiveness, which many evil things can have. I am talking about the experience of beauty, which allows one to fall in love with life despite its trying frustrations and struggles.
Let us thank the Gods for beauty. And let us welcome it into our life with song and dance and worship and love.
You ask where cometh the storm that brooding sits within this Byronesque breast, and lovely, I say, I say unto you my Gods are Gods of Thunder and Might, Gods of Wild Wind and Blitzkrieg, Gods of Love So Strange and Potent-Fierce they birth the seed of storm within us all who do them toast and honor. It is but wind seeking return to wind, sunburst seek ascent to Sol, and thunder seeking recoil to its silver-malleted electron-lusty cloud-clamoring lord! These are ancient, beyond-the-bounds-of-the-city Gods! They lead on the train, the endless battle-hoards, the long-line swirling legions of livid spirits, gusty, and lust-filled to fertilize the plains made desolate by over-domestication. I seem citizen, you see but a body, but beloved, within the cloister of these tissues train eager spirals and fierce exultations given but mere loan from Gods who long to see their art given good craze and blazen iteration in an uplift of mad and desperate surprise! For we are the scions of their sublime lineage of night-crafted lunacy and monster-milling molding in the screaming labor of earth's olden days ; and they love to see what imperfect forgings we stumbling make and offer up on altars, all to please them. They have the melee's elemental love-light within, and with angry, benevolent, wit-crafted hands they mold against the storm of being while yet keeping that storm's life alive in the bent and twisted art that, now coiling and climbing like the vine's serpentine foilage, whispers subtle and crafty beauty in the silence after sunset descends. You may now see, standing full and revelation before thee, dear, but a fit in flesh, a great coded spasm given drive and rifled by the strong, mysterious arms of divine giant-killers! I am their oh-so-lowly Midgard kin, an up-and-coming, promising young brat of beauty brooding deep to catch the currents' slip that slides so quickly through my inner being. I'm a bear-skin wearing heath-and-briar priest lodged watch-tower in the evergreen thicket to snare and spin some haggard hymns for my Most-So-Holy Lords and Ladies, who await the odd and raspy song with eager yet old ages tempered storm-ears.
There are some Gods who might simply ask for incense, or perhaps the first stalks of golden grain, or fat of the feasted bull, yet every day I feel the pull to produce storms, to hand back crafted chaos into their baroque and orc-bloodied hands of master craftship. Those hands, having strong shaped the earth, given chance to the gamble, so molding the odds that ever-impossibles might possible-seek with strive, I long to please with my own just-barely-tamed trials of rough and raw-hewn beauty, for they seek that bronco buck in all shapings. Ill has it to kill the life in that which is made, but rather like a wild bison to ride with bold peril against the evening's edge. There, shaking fist at the fires, and glance-turning, spurning the iron-cold glaciers for some glory to be found between. They know that fame is evanescent, but like a fire, is found in how high the flames may lick in that lingering moment of blaze before the black. So against that hard hearth I give Heimdall the oil of night's middling hours that he might vapor-of-the-flame carry it rainbow up star-cobbled roads to the royal, stone-laid fortresses of the mighty Gods. And into their hands of patient hale I entrust these rough-tumbled gems I caliban-carve in my humbled flights of frenzy.
Ye who hang parasite o'er the oak of kin, pruning out its world-wide boughs with sun-robbing shadow, ye mistletoes of mind, darts stealing light from shining, wondrous Baldur, ye kin of Claudius pouring poison in the ears of king and kingdom, corroding out the flesh of commonwealth and replacing with the emblem of your lord and saviour Loki : strife. For you set all asunder, making foes of could-and-would-be friends, turn cracks and crazes to gulfs, rob eyes of wide-open beauty in auto-uglification of world through your own retarded lack of imagination separating same from other in the subfascist quarantine of your racist, trollish minds. And you are the trolls. And you are the ogres. And you are the deformed, cloudy-minded fools made orc through your own dehumanization. For that human cup, so brim with broad flavor, you, O orc-worshipping denizens of shadow, refuse, spilling out mead and smuggling in venom. Venom, venom, to eat out eyes and gnaw the hearts of ears, with ugly, false delusions of smoke-and-vapor lines of small-minded separations. Celebrants of the subhuman, clone-junkies incest-seeking same and same against the different, you are the trolls, you are the ogres, you are the ugly, heartless orcs casting shame on every act of worship you sully. And my rage is Mjollnir, for I shall shut thee up, thy worthless sons of Loki seeing only through eyes of strife ; and I shall grind you to dust and feed your Gods'-gift-spat-upon with spite and cursed darkenment as roots-manure for the all-embracing tree of full relation. For I am kin, you see, to all, and your less-than-fully-human eyes need light from ones such as me, for we the noble tire of your unworthed encroachment on our most and holy sites. If ye try to twain me from my brethren, full brethren, brethren of world and full beyond, then, devotee of strife, receive thy full reward at Mjollnir's mallet, and then be bound, thy noxious Loki-spirit down in Nastrond here with serpents seek your fellows to find, above your worthless master. For your ill-tamed rage and wrath against the weave of braided difference sets your hearts a lowly thrall to wretched nidings. You are disgrace, you are stain, you are sully set to spoil all the good the Gods intend, but, troll's thrall, you shall fail. Turn back now and beg the Gods' forgiveness, if you wish at all their blessings, for their boons are beauty, long art-crafted o'er the ages to awaken and enlighten, and those who shut the eyes of soul and cut short the long arm of love, so that minds melt into narrow alleys of blind, fathoms short of beauty, there to languish -- you set your unholy claws upon the gifts of the Gods, and sure as day shall follow night, for your sacrilege you shall be judged. Set back not the clock of wit and 'ware's advancement, for we are outseekers, embracers of exotic, blending minds and genes with many -- as our Gods command.
O magnificent Tree of Stars whose canopy milky way twinkles in the dark depths beyond Night whose rich, unfathomed roots run to the source from which all emerge, and nourished in the well of wyrd, you blossom, arbor whose arms hold galaxies, wood whose sap runs with the mind made mead in those underground breweries where souls are distilled and fermented in the afterlife chambers, to soar within thy heartwood, juice beneath world and our mind sees them dancing, in truth. By root or by crown, all good Gods live within Thee, ward thee, know thee, cherish and love thee for you are the All's flower and fruit bearing forth! I am but a small tree, but in thee, in thee, O yew, O ash of the brightest fiery colors, I find ample and awe-inspiring reflection.
She whose barley hair was cut and changed for living gold did bid me fare out from her hut into the mighty cold. My father took me down to treasure his father passed to him, and with my brother, we did measure out the boons to meet the din Of endless Winter, tundra's plains, across whose storms we trekked. We strove the lovely maiden gain whose fortunes cold trolls wrecked. And through it all, you all may see I did it all for Blessed She.
For Blessed She, belov'd of jewels, whose charms I heard from Sif. Twelve trolls I challenged to a duel upon the ice, beside my skiff Beyond whose bounds the wretched hag did spit out dire curses, I downed all twelve, whose wits were lag, then with my words did worse her. Won back the gems the maiden 'dored that on a golden string did thread, then waked her brother, blessed Lord of Harvests who had seemed near dead. I took her then upon my schoon, The Gods to bless I gave this boon.
A year or more the Moon did after ride me in his ivory yacht up to starry heaven's rafters and there a riddle-contest fought With scrivened geezer, throwing puns my wit could barely answer then found that castle kingdom run by He, who's Heaven's Master. He showed me all the awed estates that glitter in that land, with praise where he had once berate in questions now he took my hand. For Love he opened all his Gates, and Blessed She became my Mate.
The sword I'd won on misty paths, when down I went to nether lands with blood I'd spilt in my great wrath that ran in veins of royal Halfdan, and on the haft of great Mjollnir, cut its thund'ring wood in two the Gods' retreat behind Fjolnir made them tremble in dark rue ; yet word upon the winds did utter he who'd bring the blade, the hand of She who hearts did flutter would a match be made. That precious edge that right my wrongs, I gladly give to sing Her songs.
And so my Bride she'll rightful be: I, who weathered storms for She.
Tossed within the waves, for you I wept, the cold sea gave no consolation. Grasping at what love from you I kept, the hardened deformed shape of my bastard nation Swept over and changed that gracious form whose beauties once you kisses-praised. A flotsam to each winter's storm the sea, in rage, like mine, did raise. The shame of fools who toss their heirlooms know not shame beside my crimes which ripped me from thy lovely, fair womb as Dietrich did our son in dark times. Though in my rage I won this banish, Lost have I not this love -- won't vanish.
Have I this day to you my love confessed, making clear this mirror in which your heart doth shine as the moon within the sun be dressed, and the days refresh, despite my long depart? Have I this night in blackest coal of murk shown how your charms shine forth like stars? As sun behind the gates of dawn doth lurk, behind your absence gloam your powers. Have I this morn your mourning's weep wiped clean with hands that love you still? From deepest wells the love still seep, as this confession shows my will. For though you think me gone and parted, These words, ring true, show love not thwarted.
Some say Love is dead, but it is we who are dead to Love, who ought be served ; and we, the rebels, thirst in drought for it, and what for nought. Say never She forsook us, when we have shunned her from our homes and hearts. Many upon a season, She, riding fairy-train in the night, hath knocked upon which doors might answer, passing by those locked to her visits. Upon Her neck ride golden those kings gifted to stand within Her graces ; and well you might ask, hath your nation earned a place near to Her, or, having given over all or most to Her rival counterfeit standing in lust of gold who, with seduction, takes the nations upon her shoulders as the pelts of a huntsman, willingly declared forfeit? Do not ask for fruits where you have not watered the tree ; beg not for juice when you have burned the orchards and cast out the gardeners. Homes must be full of love from the first womb's welcome, and congresses of law must lay down righteous boons where love may find its soil in justice. Poets must sing of Her, not alone, but in the forum, their masterspiece given fund from the king's treasury, and then, these true words spoken, the folk must abide by them and give their pledge, so that words have world's backing, and are not vain puffs of air, coins cast from a bankrupt mint, and earn no honor in Her eyes. I know that sad smirk you show, the rotted soul of one who thinks such things dreams, and you wonder why in the jaded smoke of neglect's soot the shining glory of the cat-drawn maiden showeth not Her majesty? This is not a matter one man alone may make, for the fabric of our fibres are sewn together, and their tapestries read hymns or curses to She whose blessings we ought seek before declaring Her dead. She reads those long scrolls our deeds of love or hate declare, and published by the nations, her many a fairy servant-maid distributes what boons are deserved, and you may judge by the harvests how She has been pleased. We gather our gambles from the preset odds grown obscure in the times before we met our would-be beloveds, and the chain of those who have handled and handed on the gem we seek well determines its polish and lustre, or powder of cracked chips. Oh, Lady Love may well give pardons, out to homes where she is honored, yet these are but exceptions to the general rule, a welfare distributed to the nations according to their merits as such, and how Love was met in the seasons' rounds of holy feast days. These are not light matters. Many give lip-service but no service beyond, and those who are not willing to plow and sow and thresh in her lush and wondrous fields have little wonder at meagre harvests. Have you watched the harvestman sweat? Have you seen the oxen toil? Where the soil has been stolen from the forest's natural orchards and vineyards, such labors are needed to eke the fruits from dirt too long sunbaked and left to desolation. Have you the strength, the courage, the faith to imagine an Old Growth love in climax state? Let go of mowings which cut down Love's growings. She seeks to seed your hearts with succession's fruits leading on to those misty sunlit forests where elves dance, but her fair folk will not foot-fall rumba on barren plains where life has fled for corruption. Do the Lady service, and call your kinsmen back to true devotion.
The lovely is a land, a kingdom calling out, wooing our wonder to gather in waves of bliss and belonging that lull the tristened heart to heal. There is a realm entire of thorns : Nor fruit nor flower blushes blood But prick and pain and desolation. Then numb, and thrashed, the thorn-torn soul retreats and wonders why of incarnation. Breath has been broken, a branch bough-breached to dust and damned dry. Where wonders why, why wonders soul in weeping, dry, the wetness faded : fades the frail cartilage and callous to atrophy. There are armies dessicate juice-drained flesh to dry in zombie-walking, why-wishing in the dry, whyless woe-lands, and some so cynic jaded to blaspheme that gnawed need as this the norm. No. There is a land, The Lovely, flow, and float ; glide, and glow, where welcome back the winds our breath in breathe and blessed freshened grace, to give our soul its celebrate heirlooms. In love, in love, that lovely trance that takes you to that land of lovely, dream the doorway, trance the entrance : O wild words, woven on a poet's lipped loom, take Me there, me there, where dance is driven ever on by flow and fire's surge most warm that blooms the soul's flesh! Refresh, refresh, and breathe most dear. Here is the hollow space within the world's cavern Whence world takes its wielding breath, to birth the strong-pound stream rolling flow of full life. Heaven halved us, envoys made to make the middle journey, joy in shuttling, courier, there now here. We are the waters' carrier, the well-seeking boys and girls weal to world, from dreams. These chiseled zeros of breath, caressed nothings, words from world to world are ways : well-reaching, shaped sounds seek and find that flow to Lovely's land. What else but lips that kiss, and tongue that slips o'er lips of lovers has the power breath to shape in sensuous grope, to list and lure the soul in hopeful spell, to bliss? But this? These lips? These lips. These slips of sound in rapid rhythm roaring river toss the soul to this, this bliss. The Land of Lovely, lovely land where dance and dream queen-crown Love in worship's pageants. Bow and bowing, down to beauty's bosom blessed Lady, Love. There to Sabbat, soul tends : heal. The wholeness of spirit's caressed flesh. Embrace of breath, in the whole souls' congress coming forward, line by line, to bless, in bow and kiss, the queen, when She soul-song of Lovely Land long song shares, and sway, sway the souls in waving throng thigh-strong arms embrace. This grace and boon is a birth's right written royal and sealed on the soul's song ; when sung, the word bewilded, trance's charm spellbound takes us there, The Lovely, land of grace where half our human heart belongs while living ; the wise live half home alive, luck collecting, world to weal with wish of someday soul homeland wholed, beyond this life, to live in ever, land : The Lovely.
What is the genealogy of the heterogeneous? How are we related to even that which is different? How does marriage, through love, unite that which was divided? In frithweaving, heritages are united that had been apart. The children's blood is the mixed blood of the parents, and if the parents have married more than once, there is shared heritage, through the common fund of blood, across the different lines.
Let me be more specific. Let us say a woman weds a Vietnamese, and gives forth issue, then weds a German Catholic and gives forth issue, and then weds an Orthodox Jew and gives forth issue. Those siblings now share in the heritage of each, through the common fund of blood of the mother. Even though the German has not a drop of Jew nor Vietnamese in his genes, the web has been woven. The wyrd is binding. You cannot separate me from my brothers and sisters, both literally, and through extension, metaphorically.
Whether issue or no, love is always an exchange of blood. What I love, writ small or large runs through my veins, too. Heterogenealogy connects us. It does not separate us. It allows us to explore how wide our connections really are. It invites us to investigate and embrace the mongrel within, for have been tribes' tendrils woven ever since the first dawn of days.
Let us hear 'dominant' and 'recessive' through the ears of music, a dynamic strain in a symphony full of many chords and polyphonics. One tradition may indeed lead any one of us. Very well, let it lead, but there are many guests at the table. Let them also be honored. Let toasts be raised to the guests and their kin.
Let us never forsake those whom love has brought us, atomizing them not, but loving, in whatever full struggle love truly means, that matrix which bore them forth into our arms. What made them possible to be let us love; and if we must grapple, let us grapple, and if we must let go, let us let go. The bonds of love stay true.
There is no such thing as a half-sibling. A half-sibling is a whole sibling. The beloved is all the beloved.
You may see this frith-weaving in the Ing symbol, which in its expanded form sews together two threads, just as the helices of DNA, and in its compact form shows the unity of that union which has been effected. This Ing appelation belongs not just to Freyr, but is a patronymic passed down to all who are beloved of him, and who live that love, frith-weaving, that Frey and Freya represent. Thus the Ynglings at heart are those who weave frith between tribes, found no greater expression than that Yngling Odr, Frey's beloved brother-in-law, whose rich macramed genealogy Hyndla sang to Freya. Odr is the soul. We have risen up through this genetic matrix to tie together tribes in frith, and wed our way towards Love herself.
This gives the lie to racialism, which tries to play a symphony as a monotone. Let us call in the fortes in our song, indeed, but no bad spell shall dispel the wonder of the rippling harmonics giving depth to our strong song.
Gifts of sorrow you have been given, gifts against your will, so that your soul might long to sing. A lament is a method, a way of holding close feelings that wombed may blossom into depths of poignancy and life. Regrets nurtured are the seeds of prayer, and prayer is a gateway to fulfillment beyond fulfillment or loss.
Love is that longing for what has been lost, for in love there are ecstatic unions and separations of agony. Who will find soul without love? When will love consent to uninterrupted happiness, for She weaves, and the thread moves away and then sews back together. We are apprentices, our flaws the fault in the fabric, our learnings the darnings of frayed threads. It is when love is gone that love is tested. Will love return? Will She come back to us? Have we created a noble, nurtured nest for her within our hearts? For with falcon wings, she flies, soaring. If hearts are ready, she alights and lays eggs. Will you make your boughs bowers?
Melancholy is a mode of making love She knows well, for she sees the sorrow and the struggle unavoidable in growth, and is filled with great, magnanimous compassion. In between the seedling and the oak are dark days borne alone, trials in the forest's jury of peers, reachings and missings, and sheer holdings on through the storms that make one strong and sometimes need healing.
Celebration is not the only mode of knowing love, though She loves a good feast. In loss, we find her depth ; in loss, we do her service, and penance done to love plants seeds of future pleasures.
O, beneath the sky, you will wonder, How did I survive? How could one give reckon for how one bore the varied tests that come it seems from some sadness called necessity? All you know is, awakened, you have survived, as if planted on a different shore through swathes of fog.
Life finds a way.
This Love whispers, a smile slightly breaking from Her seeming-Stoic lips ; and it is a song She sings to pines seeking light through the darkened and crowded canopy ; seeds stretching tendril in the dark and moist, hoping blind for sunlight ; larvae planted clay and loam to find their way to molting. O tender primate, weeping behind that stolid mask, you are not alone. Life is struggle, and finds a way.
If this song has come to your ears, you too have found a way, and you shall. But spurn not your sorrow ; it may guide the way in dark times, for Love hides patient behind the mask of regret. Her hair was once tied in knots, too ; her eyes forlorn and far away ; her flesh cold and longing for winter's end ; her heart broken and wondering when the beloved might arrive at last. Sing her songs. She knows. You will find it is true. She knows.
As a poet I feel we have no business but to pray. But prayer is wild, and never contained by any religion. Prayer is necessary, because of hope, despair, loss, love, longing. One might pray to anything, or anyone, or nothing at all. Prayers are poems sent by the heart. They are addressed to someone absent, who is yet present, and in the longing one may speak true and beautiful words.
Prayers make us human, cast hopeless hopes out onto the ether, extend care and regret, whist and desire, reverie and affection upon the air, sent to objects of contemplation, of lost belonging, of broken bonds found strong beyond the breaking. Prayer is human, because the heart must speak its thoughts, and needs world as audience, even in a hidden grotto.
Trees, rocks, running rivers bear witness ; broad swathes of wind-swept sky bear witness ; gulls and sparrows, toads and bears bear witness, and what the earth has heard, her creatures pass on invisible, through unseen matrices of the heart that plasmatic crackle through the loam and on the wind.
Such is the conceit of the heart, its own special delusion, a delusion to which we are, by virtue of having soul, entitled. One never knows all the prayers on the air which reach one unknown, except if one reaches out and imagines them, and in imagining, receives them. We are foolish beings, and such folly is our right of pride.
The modern world has it wrong. We are not "talking to ourselves". We are talking to the wind, and what the wind hears, it does not forget. Let us not forget the prayers cast out onto the wind, for the Breath's Father, full wisdom working, wanders there unseen.
I was a youth, and off the path I stepped, off, and onto mine. I chose this way, this way half-human, half after elvish traces in the woods.
I saw the light writing arabic-shimmer on the surface of the waters, and saw the path of beauty, and said, Yes. And Lady Love, eyes sad and smiling, said, Are you sure? To walk this path brings sorrow.
But the beauty was intoxicating. I fell in love with hypnotic words and dreams, however weird.
Lady Love, lingering, stardust blood-blooming fingers beckoning, said, Are you sure? To walk this path is to know great solitude, and the many will pass by, laughing, caught in their dallies, and you will feel longing.
My heart now hesitated, my throat gulped. The price of beauty was costly. The cost of knowing an elvish life was to bear the pains and burdens of difference. To look upon the many, and be set apart, by a destiny which calls out as if a spirit's voice off in the hinterlands. I sighed.
She said, these sacrifices may be hard to bear. You will know joys beyond joys, sorrows beyond sorrow, yet pleasures and boons that fruit the plush of the mainstream roads may long be lost to you.
Yet I danced, I opened mouth and tasted sunlight, my hands held up water and watched it wondrous drip into liquid pools of clear flow. The fire spoke hymns on the waves, and my eyes curious longed to know the poems spoken. Yes, I said to beauty, yes.
Yet one time more our Lady Love did speak to me, and asked with warning, Are you sure? For you will love as few love, and I will feed you fruits from the most ripened, luscious tree, full of drunken juice ; and yet you, you shall know the loss of love many a time. You will hold the corn in Spring, and mourn its husk in Fall, and being a knight in my service, those who seek a normal man may come, and charmed, give magic kisses in the night, yet marvelous creatures, soulful animals, move on to ripen in the herd. You will have to hold this sorrow. You must walk through deserts to taste the thorny cactus fruit whose flowers open only once a season. Then love may pass for some time. And child, you may be bitter. Think not the sweet fruits are the only ones you will taste. Maror and wormwood gruits brew in elvish ale, too.
And youth, fool, folly tossing skip o'er cliff, I said, not knowing what may come, not feeling all the losses many, Yes, yes, and yes.
And here I am three decades hence, and only now this pact becomes plain in the passage of time. Some destinies are doomed, others are chosen, yet they are destined all the same. I shudder when I look upon youth and ponder the peril they everyday face in chains of choices : to bind, to unbind, each a choice that opens worlds, closes others. Even the luckiest life enfolds and embraces serious tragedies, or at least near brushes against them. Life is full of close calls, too close for comfort. The juice of youth is melancholy, reaching in hope for unseen fulfillment, and you can see it in their desperate, eager eyes : hungry for life, playing in the peril, careless and trusting and wound-tending onwards.
What a risk and gamble is life! How easy to fall away, to lose one's star in the fog. Yet if one chances to survive, the astral realms are forgiving. One might find the star again. But nothing is ever the same. Every choice lays down that doom. Play well in the peril, youth, take care : the spells you cast now are prayers the Gods will surely reckon.
I made love to the sea through thee ; I made love to the sea. In coming and going, I set my heart upon the waves and words cast out to please thee whose nets did draw the water's welcome before I came to tease thee. I made love to the sea through thee ; I made love to the sea. Nor here nor there, the sea will 'test, my heart is ever wandering. The kisses of thy fairy lips did ever set me pondering. I made love to the sea through thee ; I made love to the sea. Your heart was weird, your heart was soft, we often shared our dreams. The memory of the love we shared is not less than it seems. I made love to the sea through thee ; I made love to the sea. It seems at loss, an exile now, my heart may ever be. The sound of singing waves does sting and make me think of thee. I made love to the sea through thee ; I made love to the sea. I made love to the sea through thee ; I made love to the sea.
The moon mocks me, bids me tend down through labyrinthine caverns there to seek the world's deep end and drink the draughts of Mimir's tavern. Yet in my mind I know I'll never of that Well of Wisdom drink for only souls more worthy ever allowed are over that font's brink. My lunacy doth draw me down the edge of blade more wondrous seek that victory bringing when is found make blood of father's killer leak. For destiny I must fulfill like siren's call, beyond my will.
Still hammer at the foundry, the red-hot iron pounded, tongs in hand, to forge a form of voice and glyph that speaks what Saga sayeth: with the eye of Milton made, with the bones of Blake invibrate, with the speech of Shakespeare warped to wyrd of Bragi's craft, Ymir laid out upon the anvil : blood and bones and breath make world. Blood and bones and breath make world.
They spat slander in blood and curse- calling down from the ship-lord's son's oath to ever free those tied in chains when they, enthralled by gold's calling, mired the pine-and-oak-carved crafts given bless by the Mere-king's foam-fingered hands to sail seaward as floating temples of frith, by hauling as cargo Frigga's handmaiden Africa's children in chains to live as thralls, and wash upon the waves, to spill vein's bless slaughter into the tossing fish-bed's depths, the freedom-lord's father insulted by carry strong men and women worthy over the pulsed bosom of brine. Kidnapped! No crime to call for enthrallment ; forefathers felled in graves long ago in Saxon slaughter at hands of Charlemagne silent cry up the yew-yards how they, once thousand years past, trail of Saxon tears were folk-removed by tyrants quick on stripping their heathen hearts of faith, yet not across waters against their will, even they! The burning of the Irmunsil, its ashes cast venom-virile into the waves, the shocked cries of the broken backs at knee with weep and gnashing cleaved and burnt soil broken from the homeland's heart, what more these battered peasants of Ethiopian stock, proud scions of kings and woodland wizards, endured, anguished, and silent-moaned, upon the desecrated temple-grounds of Fridlef's porpoise-highways! Will usura's spell silence the sound of Magna Charta rush spiral through Saxon veins, singing virile, so soon as a slave sets foot on soil of Saxon land it leaves its chains unbound with British freedom in full? Invidia's voice screech-cackles, and screaming, drowns out the ancient rights to ruin, to fill the coffers of the cargo carriers, laying down that law of blood broken boomerang, whereby six hundred thousand sons of Albion shall brother-fight-brother fall to fulfill the iron-clad order of Urd : a gift for a gift, a life for a life ; and so we might guard our lives with right, and good judgements, if wise. Wise too many of our struggling sires were not, and Loki's lyrical tongue, with laughter, gave guidance to lawyers to trick with lies ; and the Wolf lay unbound, Heimdall's children wept in chains, the coils of the sea-serpent strangled wrenched their proud limbs and sinews to choking, and the whip, and the whip, and the whip ever-lashing ceased not to sorrow those souls so life-longing for freedom our father's fathers denied. Yet fiery wod and will for freedom worked up storms in speech of some, who wrath lightning-beard hammer brought down the bold words, "Abolish!", and John Brown heeded, Thor smiling proud. It was a strong day for old Gods then, when the blood boiled free in British-born veins, reins-snip raiding, and rile, as in Roman days past, when wolf-clad kings would cross the Rhine, and fire the fortress in flames as offering to Gods who hated chains in every sinew of their Godflesh, for whom bindings were meant to bind only those who'd bite the folk. And Thom Jefferson wrote, in that strong sounding of independence, to rob a folk of freedom is crime, breeds more crime and crime on top of that, to blood and open tyranny. Saga will speak : Mother Earth, open up archives, unheard songs, vanquished voices, rise, let the skald hear the calls, so we may speak the sooth that cures. Truth has its own liniments, spread broadly, squeezed deeply, undoes bruise and wound. May the hard legacy's lessons never fail the minds of men again.
Wyrd wall willed up between our paths, Thisbe, but I shall not the sword fall on, but whisper these silent hymns of praise for that wonder other side wall of for beauty, the sound of your voice once breath upon my earlobes, tongue's tales woven crafter-strong and shared I honor, sharing my own song and shall paint murals this side the fresco, portraits of that poetess whose enchantment I do adore, and be not despaired, no matter the lioness walks, for she carries invisible the heart's holy queen to test o'er walls whom love stays true.
I think we're just beginning to relearn freedom. It's something that's going to take many generations, and a lot of work. We go to the wild country to relearn what it's like, to soak it into our breath and bones and blood, in hopes that when we go back to the zone of civilization, we carry with us a little taste of what it is like to truly be free.
There are two strands in American law, one coming out of the British feudal experience, which expressed itself through Coke's parliamentary absolutism, whereby the all and whole of life becomes taxed, regulated, ordinanced, to a degree of minutiae and interference with free action that is insulting to any notion of real freedom. Whether enacted by a king or a legislature, whether that legislature is distant or local, this is not freedom. This is legalism strangling out authentic life. It partakes of the nature of Jormungand, the great serpent who gradually as time goes on squeezes more and more of our beloved Mother Earth, and full of as much venom.
But there is another strand that was in stubborn defiance and retreat, a strand that still held on to the Magna Charta and all the ancient rights of Englishmen, that was so surrounded by strangles of feudal law and minutiae, arbitrary powers of unnoblemen (the proper name for nidings who long ago forgot their obligation to serve the folkrights and the Gods) and unkings, and the brute force of modernism and commercialization, that it did not still know freedom in its bones, but it remembered an inkling, and it held on to that with dear life. This current then came to America, and in America, a people holding on to its last remnants of the tribal rights guaranteed by the Magna Charta discovered peoples and tribes who actually still knew freedom, and actually still held on to their ancient rights, and this, along with the wide open spaces of forest and meadow, in whose loving, brambled embrace the frontiersman might escape out beyond the pale of the law of strangulation, inspired the essence coagulated into the ambered sap of Magna Charta to come alive again within the folk. The book Indian Givers gives a good introduction to the notion that it was living Native American societies that allowed English folk (English, Irish, Scottish, as well as Dutch, German, French, etc.) to begin to rewild. It was this reawakening of the spirit of Magna Charta that made for our revolution, for the guarantees of the Bill of Rights within the Constitution, and for the strong clinging to rights and freedom that are written all over our history.
But this liberatory invocation of freedom often remains rhetoric in the face of the other strand with which it, in contradiction, co-exists : the plenary power of legislation (according to Coke, and according to actual municipial practice in the United States) to touch everything within its grasp as it so chooses, and this banal totalitarianism sometimes masks itself as a form of "democracy". Ancient folk may have had more sense and simply called it "meddling", an attempt to regulate everything in life externally, in advance, outside the good sense, wisdom, prudence, and spontaneity of the free actors involved in a situation.
This feudal, Cokeian totalitarianism of banality is pervasive and expresses itself in endless ordinances, codes, and libraries of statutes. Such baroque legalism is certain to produce contempt for law (which it is not, although it is power) in the hearts of those who are truly free. Much of the rhetoric of freedom remains unrealized promise, untapped potential, the mere echo of a promissory note that hints at unheard-of vaults of freedom.
Freedom is something we are still learning. This is what the land told me when I went out to it today. I went up into the hills, hills which always preserve the older, wilder forms of life, and in that broad splay of color and vegetation, grounded, gnarled chaparral, and million-years-old sandstone geology, I saw, with my eyes of heart and eyes of contemplation, that Loki's serpent has managed to wrap its tendrils skillfully and pervasively around much of life, strangling it out, and therefore, we are still learning freedom.
There was/is a movement, variously called the "patriot" or "common law" movement that has generated a fascinating literature. These are folks who largely, I think, sense the discrepancy between these two strands of law, one a strong defense of freedom, the other that which strangles freedom, and have created an expressive literature around these contradictions that has too often degenerated into a crippling literalism. Finding themselves surrounded by endless mesh of legal barbed wire, and looking to the spirit invoked in '76, they said, this cannot apply to a freeman. This cannot apply to someone grounded in Magna Charta. This intuition is correct! There is a fundamental contradiction. But they then began to imagine a kind of legal prestidigitation, a kind of juggling of legal process, where, with the right passwords and the invocation of appropriate legal jargon, they could reinvoke their ancient rights, and bypass the statutory chains that increasingly surround a dungeon they once felt was called "America". Such ungrounded hocus-pocus has largely proven a fool's errand that has ended a lot of people up in jail, to which many have responded, "Oh, well, they didn't have the right hocus-pocus," and go forward to brew up more legal incantations. Meanwhile, they distribute unchecked fakelore that cites some cases accurately, selectively quotes out of context from other court cases, and in some cases constitutes almost complete fabrication. I call it "fakelore" because it distributes itself like folklore, is often as unchecked, but lacks the authenticity, groundedness, or proven experience of folklore that has had time to mature. I might more kindly call it fakelore reaching after folklore, perhaps, with some greater practical intelligence and savvy, on its way to becoming folklore. The citation of fake court cases and out-of-context court cases is deplorable, and the publishing of such material used to be considered, quite rightfully in my mind, contempt of court, because it constitutes a danger to report a court case declaring one thing when in fact it declares another. This is not an impingement upon freedom of speech or press, because one maintains the right to disagree with a court case, and even to hold widely differing interpretations of the ruling, but it must be grounded upon an authentic reporting and citation of the ruling itself. Why is this important? If you distribute literature that purports that certain rights may be recognized in court, but this is not true, and then people, trusting that literature, go out and act upon that purported confirmation of right, they may end themselves up in a lot of legal trouble. It's fraudulent and unbrotherly.
But this does not mean that the common law movement is all nonsense. Its fetish for arcane legal incantation may put many off, and the unfortunate fact that many of its early strands did indeed seem to stem out of racist Christian Identity groups really ought to make one genealogically suspicious, but it is, I think, an error to dismiss in toto, because there is an element here of folk education in common law, and a reinvocation of ancient rights which really are ancient rights! They are so ancient that many of them predate Christianity! One of the errors these folks make is assuming that people in power must follow the rules. This is an incredibly naive stance. People in power follow power, and consult their lawyers when it seems like someone might call them on it, and then they utilize technicalities to engineer what they wanted to do anyway. The idea that people in power can be constrained with the mere invocation of a legal formula is sophomoric idealism : adorable, in a way, but dangerous. When power is actually checked through popular scrutiny, power tends to approximate rules, and then let the lawyers do the clean-up.
I suspect that a lot of people in power dislike the common law movement not primarily because of the racism of some of its genealogical strands, but because it carries the threat of ordinary people calling on the law, and interpreting it according to their strong, ethical sense of freedom. It threatens to take law out of the hands of elite professionals, who serve the strangling serpent, and regenerate authentic law, as decided by empowered juries. Here Lysander Spooner's important historical treatise on the ancient rights of juries gives actual grounding to popular movement. However, until such time as jurors all over the country know their actual rights and history, and are willing to invoke them in open court in defiance of magisterial, Cokeian judges, of what actual effect is such submerged knowledge? It remains that boiled-down essence, that coagulated sap, that the colonists carried with them that still requires full awakening. Until empowered juries begin nullifying statutory arrogance, on an unprecedented scale, in alignment with protest groups petitioning for redress of grievances in the streets, such that it really, authentically becomes the "second house" or "popular branch" of the judiciary, as some have put it, and thus begins to put popular checks on legislative mania, we will remain tangled in legal codes and statutory brambles largely dreamed up by the lobbyists of the rich, who certainly have little interest in non-wealthy classes retaining anything of authentic freedom.
Learning how to become free men on the land is of utmost importance. It is a project that I suspect will take some time. And it will require some grounding in indigeneity that racists (conscious or no) who simply assume the legitimacy of "Manifest Destiny", never investigating actual original title issues in this country, will probably not find. The question of the true holders of odal rights in a country is of some extreme importance in determining your law and your foothold on any land, for if you come in with the conqueror, and only on the basis of that conquest, there is some reason to believe that one is walking in under color of feudal law, with fealty to the sovereign/conqueror, rather than any legitimate rooting in the land itself. This is an extremely complex issue that is barely ever talked about in the United States, except, of course, by Native American tribes. It is worthy of note that treaties, under the Constitution, are above all statutory law, and within a heathen context, represent sacred oaths that, as Voluspa indicates, anger Thor to a pitch of rage when parties unilaterally break them. Considering the countless treaties that have been broken by Washington, it might be a bit humbling for a heathen to realize that the term grið-níðingr, or "truce/treaty-breaker", is one of the strongest forms of legal abuse or disapprobriation that existed amongst ancient heathens.
What is your law? What is your land? These are fundamental questions, questions the answers to which most have no clue.
The literature of the common law movement makes for a fascinating read that is not entirely unprofitable, so long as one's critical mind is alert to its errors and naivetes, for there is to be found therein a legitimate reaching after the ancient rights, which can both educate heathens, as well as be more greatly informed by knowledge of heathen culture. This is not to say that I endorse the literature ; only to note it as an important curiosity that might inspire an authentic populism, if it were more grounded in a shrewd study of history. Moreover, many of its tenets, while not literally able to banish the statutory chains that bind us, would make for meaningful popular legal debate, and such debate about the fundamentals of law could be incredibly fructifying.
Here a critical note may be of some value. The lack of attention given in the heathen community to the study and restoration of heathen law is both baffling and deplorable. Magna Charta itself is little known and studied, with the pre-Conquest Anglo-Saxon law which Magna Charta was largely fortifying, being a no-man's land ; deeper still, the Gragas and Frostathing laws remain largely untranslated, let alone available or studied, not to mention the very important Saxonspiegel, the Code of Jutland, the Frisian laws, and all the laws of the Germanic tribes as written down in Latin. Why should such be a priority for heathens? With law the land shall be inhabited, begins the Code of Jutland, and when heathens complained to Christian kings about their usurpations, they referred to their religion as their law. The two were inseparable, because the Gods protected those who lived freely within the law. The law-assemblies, after all, were places of sacred invocation of the Gods, where the Gods watched very closely the decisions come to by men. "What you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven", adjusted for idiom, is not just a Christian sentiment, but an authentically heathen one. Where we have authentic law-assemblies and they hand down discovered and authentic heathen law, we shall be held accountable. Where we do not have and have not reconstituted authentic law-assemblies, we shall also be held accountable.
Law and freedom should not be in contradiction ; the one should protect the other. We are still relearning freedom. The greatest tasks in reconstituting the culture and spirituality of our ancestors remain ahead. Who will speak up as pioneer? Who will take hold of the ancient embers and carry the torch forward?
These are not dry, abstract matters, the dust of musty archives, the split-hairs of scriveners. These are matters of the heart, that emerge more prominently the greater you bring your soul into relation with the land and its many spirit-guardians (collectively, the "heath"). Authentic law bubbles up from the deepest layers of Wyrd. Such a torah is indeed written on the heart, and not to be found in the arbitrary enactments of meddlers, whose love of freedom is overshadowed and buried by their compulsion to control. Real law controls the wolves and grinds down monsters, releasing the free ; law turned on its head and made into unlaw controls the free and grinds down the folk, releasing the monsters. Look around and decide which strand has greater power, and then make your choice as to which side you will lend your weight. Follow your heart.
Avaritia, the Cruel Matron of Lupus immolatio thrice arise ever smoke draw cheat from hearts of men towards other men in on and on circle of evil, breed war, fraternatio crumble, amicitia divide, unanimitas sunder, so most men spoiled through her lycanthropia: homo homini lupus, where Heimdall would have homo sacra res homini. Let liberi be taught how ever she lurks in crystalli-cold hearts that no ill spell negligo, married to decipio, calvor, fraudo, father of God-swallowing Wolf. Avaritia est unquam maleficia, incantatio stolen from holy Amor, and given to mere lucrum. To chase forth the angel who speaks Gods' whispers from one's home is nefas. Nefas! Heed not Avaritia. She whispers usura, invasio, usurpo, despolio; aegrotatio, toxicum, corrumptella. Seek aequitatis, audentis, prudentia, sanctitatis, pietas. Through these walls well-held she cannot enter.
Tell them, Mistress, the fair sway of the shimmering paths ; tell them, Lady, allure of enchantment beyond dreaming's reach ; tell them, Marvelous One, of deep draughts of trance we once shared, tasted once which, sours the world of dust and trauma, hassle and chore. Speak, O Muse of Lip's Kiss's Song, of exile, of drear once driven out from those elfin ways to walk the ways of men again, how many fade and wither, wastreled and wretched, their eyes afar and seeking bliss once tasted. Speak truths of your poisons, O Lustrous Queen, one drop thereof a toxin torment with fields of endless flowers, running, soaring, flying beyond the cage of static. You choose ecstatic those to taste these brews that once begone would leave the mind a'spinning ever after. And yet if loyal we must linger, speak in song those virile visions, that these lands at last elysian fields might find in friendship formed, thy kingdom come, O cougar-carried, petals peeled upon the pavements, for thy footsteps fertilize our lives and lands when you wouldst come. Yet honest we must earn with honor welcome for thy wondrous ways, and too few try, I tearful ponder, to pave the paths that please you so. May this standstill stumble, tumble the towers that treasono's obscure thy blessed bosom. May you hold dominion over the all the hearts of men, O Love, for you hold pieces of that chessgame golden, grass played O so long ago, each pendant strung, in sovereign power, upon that celebrated necklace silver-strung yet gleaming golden.
The line of kings has fallen, Queen ; no noble folk to court thy magic elfin handmaids. No bold souls brave to buy a kingdom for thy crafts with courage now. Earthlands lie barren, monsters hold key, land is locked out from love's great sway. Masterful Mistress, meet our prayer, bid us boon, teach us words that willful spoken ward away that sorceress whose angst and greed lie heft on humans. Free us, Freya, or help us free ourselves so we may meet thee kindly, welcome thee to walk our ways, as we would willing walk in yours. I speak true words and bidding.
Each day by dawn or dread night long, love, I lingered in lyrical praise or prayer towards thee and thine and all thy charms, or woe, wishing away all of thy tears wept, that well my woman might be, even though I was exiled far from thee. Washed in waves of the whelming sea, I drifted, half-drowned, in the dreary waters, which grief, that grew from the grave of my child, drew out my dreadnought, which drenched in tide, sunk, sunk down with my son and crew. The cutting of cold waves kind has not been to the bold soul whose bower you shared ; lost, upon the lone sea, looking forlorn, I have wandered, wayless, without hope. In madness mired upon the mere's grey waves, love, I have lingered in love's echo, kept quick the quickened spark, for I, your Odr, am ever true.
Asmund, Odr's son by Freya, had set out in his great ship Gnod leading the fleet against Dietrich, and the father, seeing the son in danger, came to his aid, but Asmund was killed by Dietrich. Odr in his rage killed hordes, but the ship Gnod sunk there with all hands lost, while Odr, lost at sea, became wrapped in the hide of a strange sea-beast, and thus exiled, wandered the waters waiting for Freya, who at first thought him lost.
There's something wonderful about having a chief God whose wisdom crackles with practicality. Odin advises us to eat a little before we go to a social gathering lest we lose out on the conviviality for our own ravenousness.
Havamal 33 : Árliga verðarskyli maðr opt fánema til kynnis komisitr ok snópirlætr sem solginn séok kann fregna at fá,"Early should a person take a meal, unless he comes amongst his kin, (for he) sits and mopes, acting like a hungry glutton, and can ask little."
Boy, is that true! I never really gave this stanza much thought. Then, today, I went to a vegan gathering after not having eaten all day. All I cared about was gulping down my food! I felt rude, because the point of the gathering was to interact, which I did a little, but mainly, I wolfed down my food!
Meals are meant to be social occasions, full of conviviality and the opportunity to learn. They are not just about eating. Eating together facilitates something larger. If all you can think about is your stomach, you lose out on the magic.
Ghosts! the eyeless African corpses haunt! Halt the endless array of assembly-line morgue-craft Darfur-drifting on the savannah floors of our Beloved Mother Earth's Grand Dame Matron, Africa! She has disir in every land.
Old crone of the barren Bretton Woods breeds battle-carrion's cravers sent to austere fleece the false folk-kings' minions thralled in her long line of golden glitter'd venom-bait. The robber-barons bought, break frith, split tribes, forge feud, bear tax-sack back to that world's frigid bank blanked swamp in the East ; and when peasants prove unable mouth so large and toothed to fill with flesh, let meat of their bones starve humbled in hovels, no shield-king to shield them. Thus the myths repeat, with loss.
Her grey-clad kinfolk, lined serpent neck to belly, know squeeze, and stalk low in the winding grass seek 'sinuate the weave and warp of world to strangle, and choke with tribute the rights' parchments praised.
And you shall know them by the serpents round their necks ; are they the ones you call your fathers? Forefathers ripened fruit on that ancient yew catcall righteous gripe and slander down the ancient halls on false fathers serpent-slaved to gold-greed's harvest. They are unafraid to proclaim blaspheme where the sons have fallen fast from bright track's forest throughways. Now your choose 'tween grandfathers mighty and minions of Heid make choice. If you pay the kinscild, you earn your way into those mighty masters' homes, and there the strong mirth knows no halt. Choose your cheer.
The world has entered into me its bitter dust and taste, corrode, of history's unwailed cemetaries. The banished moots, where justice, exiled, wept, and gnashed broken teeth. The world is frozen at Runnymede, let robes and wigs be thrown on flames the false tongue fans with crooked proclamation. What barons bring folks' hopes hither with arms to ring Niccolo's prince that he might with blood sign back the broken rights on parchment made of yew?
Hew the laughter and celebration of princes, the wolves' feast is the lambs' slaughter, and Gods' tears are venom dripping on eyes hazed over with lies that they might see, just see for one moment what mischief has been wrought with mayhem's dalliance.
O, history passes prosaic, but leaves its stain poetic ; and prophets ponder the storming verse ink-billowed in oil plumes of brine blooming poison and nightmare in the far reaches of impossibility taking root in the unseen but felt banal. They hardly believe the plot. We are dreamed by shocked eternity.
We do not sing of Deganawidah but the white billows' brine-wind whipped sails of Santa Maria. There is testimony in the songs unsung ; law shimmers in the sun above the Western waves evaporate' the voice of Chungichngish. A drum still beats pulse in the heart of the land beneath feet. Open up the ancient suits, and hear cause: straight the crook, call witness, let jury hear plea. Blood runs wergild in the sand, you have at last a chance to stand.
You are but a shadow on a general's back carried over cluster-bomb cleats deep-teeth bite bayonet on the crushed rights' gravel and rubble. Never on real ground stood, your soil is leviathan's flesh etin-tower terrible over the real land, invisible. Now take up feet and walk on rights, if you would have them.
Western sails, the sleek skiff sets out sunset upon waves Manannan's maids cast cool : and the Irishman meets his mothers and fathers' summerland country, with cups of quickened mead smooth to soul, he goes loved to lands where fairies hold sway, seeks songs, and finds them.
My good friend Eve Ghost lost her father this week, and sends him shortly upon his way to the Western halls of the forefathers. To bring her strength, and honor her, I dedicate this poem. May the precious sup of life's green fluids running sap-ferment from Yggdrasil's evergreen boughs restore the strength of kin, and seal the sore to wholeness, let it be so, I say upon this day and bid it done by Gods who bless.
Exiled, her green pastures parted o'er the blue billows of wave, I leave the lovely land of my mistress unwilling, sold thrall by the cold storm rage, a ship tossed, wretched, grasping foam-thrashed splinters in the deep. Lost, my loins' patrimoan, that thousand-three man galleon glory, gone, bitter billows taste of brave fade full, and fold into the foreign mold's skin, where frenzy's force brain-fog sunk into the beastly howls of brown-whisker'd face, I quiver, now gliding grace majestic in the glass-green fold of wet, awaiting that woman's fair and free face, if these barks bounce echo on the banks of her amber-beaming grain-laiden shores.
If you studied, you would know the allusions herein.
I like Loki. As a character. He's a fabulous, salaciously sly figure, fun in a dramatic sense. Similarly, I love Heid. As a character. She is dastardly, and one you just love to hate. Both of these are wonderfully rich, tragic figures, brim with potential and even haughtiness, whose brilliance, unguided by wisdom and compassion, brings about their downfall (a downfall in which they wish to pull the whole world!). One has to admire characters as rich as these.
That's because these are exquisite characters crafted by masters of Divine Opera, which is what the Northern myths are, brilliantly entertaining, theatrically engaging, and dramatically profound operas portraying the nature of the Gods and their interpenetration into the lives of human beings, as it happened in the beginning of time, and set the stage for the world as we know it, with all its agonies and ecstasies.
But appreciation of an operatic figure as a character is a very different thing than imputing any worth to the spiritual force behind the operatic figure. Discernment is needed here. I'd be one of the first to audition for the part of Loki in a play, because it'd be a terribly fun part to play, and Lopt, though he is now bound and suffering, certainly has lessons to teach to those wise enough to not get taken in by his contemptuous love of gullibility, and he is genuinely appreciative of portrayals of the old days when he was once young and still full of potential and spark. He's particularly proud of his pranks, and even his diabolically precise plans of sabotage. Someone has to admire them. And in a dramatic sense, it's fine to speak up in appreciation.
But this is a completely different thing than honoring the spiritual force that is one of the most widely worshipped of divinities --- in the actual deeds of human beings. And if you look around, that worship of folly, treachery, cheating, adultery, and lying has made the world a much less fun, exciting, and engaging place to live in.
So admire the character, but reserve your judgement for spiritual forces worthy of worship.
You befriend someone who's a little sly, but full of potential. He provided company in a difficult time, so you return the favor. You invite him into your house to stay with your family. One of the first things he does is offer to negotiate a contract to have a big, nice fence built around your house. Sounds good. Except he negotiated that ruining your house and giving away your daughter to the enemy would be the price. Some deal, eh? Then, behind your back, he delivers your most precious resources into your sworn enemy's hands, resources without which you will eventually dwindle and die, and only brings them back under threat of bodily harm. He turns two of your allies against each other, completely alienating them so they wish to deal neither with you nor each other anymore, and all the aid and support they were lending you dries up. He raises a ferocious son, a predator destined to kill you, raises another son who does nothing but spit venom, and engenders a daughter who seems to bring sickness wherever she goes. He leads one of your sons into an ambush, and brings about the death of another one of your sons.
Now let's say that your family is somewhat important. You're in charge of watching over the weal of a number of surrounding districts and counties, who are depending on you to keep things in order. Your guest, it turns out, has no problem making deals with your enemies whose activities directly negatively impact the economic productivity of all the people you're entrusted to protect.
Finally, when you are assembled in a truce-hall, under cease-fire conditions, he shows up, kills one of the servants of the resident ambassador (with whose people you are in an uneasy truce), endangering the position of everyone in the hall, and then slanders every member of your family publicly, in front of those with whom a shaky cease-fire have been negotiated, and confesses openly to the murder of your son.
Some questions :
Would you ever welcome this person back into your house again? Would you feel justified in calling for this person's execution or permanent exile? Would you ever want to have anything to do with anyone who knowingly associated with this person? Would you ever want anyone you love or protect utilizing this person as some kind of example or model? Would you ever buy any argument that suggested that overall this person's actions represented a net gain to you and your family? Have any of your answers been motivated in any way by Christian theology, or by your own gut feelings and common sense, and do you think that most sane people, regardless of their religious or philosophical conditions, would probably tend to draw the same conclusions?
