Happy Solstice & Abbots Bromley Horn Dance

On Darkness:

The child is born in the darkness of the womb; the chicken hatched after incubation. Birth begins in darkness, as dawn follows the long night, and spring springs from winter. We must not interrupt the incubation period within us, or force it to bear fruit before its time. To pull a seed out of the earth before it sprouts, to open a chrysalis before the emerging butterfly forms its wings may prevent new life from awakening.

- Torrey Philemon

"You darkness, that I come from,

I love you more than all the fires

that fence in the world,

for the fire makes

a circle of light for everyone,

and then no one outside learns of you.

But the darkness pulls in everything;

shapes and fires, animals and myself,

how easily it gathers them!—

powers and people—

and it is possible a great energy

is moving near me.

I have faith in nights."

- Rainer Maria Rilke, On Darkness

Out of darkness, light: Solstice and the lunar eclipse

by Starhawk, 10-20-2010

Winter Solstice--the shortest day and longest night of the year. For Pagans, Wiccans and Goddess worshippers, this is one of our most sacred holidays. As winter closes in, the darkness grows and the light recedes. For Pagans, darkness is the necessary balance to light. We don't conceive of the dark as evil, but as a place of potential, of gestation--the black, fertile soil where the seed puts forth roots and shoots, the dark womb where new life is nurtured. But being humans, we also have a natural affinity for the light, the time of growth and new beginnings, of warmth and color and bright new hopes. Solstice reminds us that no darkness, no loss, no grief or disappointment is final. Out of darkness, light is born. Every ending gives rise to a new beginning. Out of disappointment and despair comes new courage, new hope.

This year, Solstice coincides with a total lunar eclipse. The last time this happened was in 1544. The earth aligns directly with the sun and the moon, casting a shadow on the moon's face. The moon is a Super Moon, at its closest to the earth. And, so my astrologer friends tell me, we are also directly aligned with our Milky Way's Galactic Center, where the galaxy gives birth to stars. We are in a great birth canal, on the night when mythically Mother Night gives birth to the Sun Child of the New Year.

What does this all mean? For those of you who like to align your meditations and your magic with the movements of the stars, we stand tonight between the past and the future. For the first hour and a quarter of the eclipse, (starting at 1:30 am East Coast Standard Time), it's as if we step out of time. We are free of the past, and we can consciously create the future, for ourselves, for our communities, for the earth.

It's a night to take a good look at what you want to shed. What are the behaviors, the beliefs, the patterns that no longer serve? Let them go. Make the commitment to change.

And it's a night to envision the future you want to create. What world do we want to see? How will we step up to face the huge challenges of healing our communities, our economies, our climate and our environment? What risks will we need to take? What will we need to let go of, and what will we need to embrace?

And hey, even if you think all astrology is bunkum, take a moment tonight to go out, to marvel at the moon with the mark of the earth written across her face, to let go of what you no longer need and call in what you want. And if you can do this with friends, and family, in community, with good food and a warm fire and a few candles, and raise a cup of gratitude for all we have and all we share, you may find that the courage, the support, the power, the love and luck you need for this New Year are born in the depths of the night, and awaken at dawn with the rising sun.

A blessed solstice to you all!

And with that in mind I'd like to share with you this special mysterious ancient solstice tradition that was still being performed the last time there was a full-eclipse on a winter solstice, some hundreds of years ago. I'd like to specially dedicate this post to Joski at Merlin's New Rags and Gadaya at the Old Weird America, for their superb scholarly posts and special collections of different versions of ancient folk tunes.

"Besides for solace of our people, and allurement of the savages, we were provided of Musike in good variety not omitting the least toyes, as Morris dancers, Hobby horses, and Maylike conceits to delight the Savage people, whom we intended to winne by all faire means possible."

The Abbots Bromley Horn Dance

The Abbots Bromley Horn Dance is the oldest surviving ritual dance in the northern hemisphere. The dance dates back at least to the early medieval period. The first written record of its performance is from the Barthelmy fair in 1226. Historians have suggested that it celebrates the purchase of hunting rights in Needwood Forest from the Abbot of Bromley, restoring previous Saxon privileges. It is performed every year on Wakes Monday in the village of Abbots Bromley, in the English Midlands. At 8:00 a.m. the horns are taken from the church, where they are kept during the year, and the dancers make their rounds, stopping at various locations throughout the village and its surrounding farms and pubs, a distance of about ten miles. After dancing all day, the horns are returned to the church in the evening.

The Horn Dance team consists of six Deer-men, a Fool, a Hobby Horse, Maid Marion (a man dressed as a woman), a Bowman (Robin Hood or Boy Cupid), and two musicians. The horns are a mystery. They are large reindeer horns mounted on wooden effigies of stags' heads, with the largest pair weighing about 25 pounds. Chemical dating places them at around 1000 years old. Since there are no records of reindeer living in Britain since Neolithic times, there is speculation that these may have been imported especially for the dance. Three of them are painted black, and three brown. Once they were red and white, said to represent the battle between winter and spring, darkness and light.

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Does the dance represent a ritual combat between the forces of light and darkness? Or does it reenact a stylized hunt? In primitive societies, the miming of a successful hunt is often used as 'sympathetic magic' to give power over real quarry. The famous wall paintings at Les Trois Frères, France, known as "The Sorcerer" show a naked man dancing in antlers and a deer mask. A carving found at Pin Hole Cave, Creswell Crags, Derbyshire, (known to have been used by Neolithic hunters) portrays a man in an animal headdress. Both suggest that pre-historic shaman used animal disguises in their rituals.

According to the locals, the dance is supposed to bring good fortune to the people and fertility to the crops. In its slow and serpentine windings, is it stirring some ritual magic from a long-forgotten past? There is no way of knowing, and that is part of the enigma of the horn dance.

Although traditionally performed on Wakes Monday, the dance was also performed on other special occasions. For over 400 years now, the leadership of the horn dance has remained in the Bentley family. Although generally performed only by the men, in the 2000 dance Robin Hood was played by a young girl. The mysterious tune generally associated with the dance was first written down in 1857.

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There are several theories concerning the roots of this peculiar festival. It may well have begun as a Winter Solstice ritual, but it has also been suggested that it was born when King Henry I (1100-1135 AD) granted hunting rights to the people of the area. The dance was supposed to have been created as a mark of gratitude.

The hunting rights theory is suspect, however, because the Horn Dance shows signs of having had a much earlier, pre-Christian beginning when magic and fertility ceremonies were very much aspects of the lives of ordinary people. It's interesting to note that some of the figures to be seen in the world-famous cave paintings at Lascaux look very like the Abbots Bromley Horn Dancers. These figures are over 20,000 years old, so perhaps the true origins of the dance you can see today at Abbots Bromley are far more ancient than most people realize.

The Abbots Bromley Variations

1. Tony Hall - The Abbot's Bromley Horn Dance

2. Martin & Jessica Simpson & Lisa Ekstrom - Abbotts Bromley Horn Dance/In Winter's Shadow

3. Andrew Cronshaw - Wheelwright Robinson's tune for the Abbots Bromley horn dance

4. Trotto - Abbotts Bromley Horn Dance

5. Leif Alpsjö - The Abbots Bromley

6. Richard Greene & Beryll Mariott - Abbot's Bromley Horn Dance

Tony Hall's and Trotto's versions are probably the most traditional forms of the tune, though one with just tin whistle and drum would be even moreso. And yes, I do realize that Jessica Simpson's voice on "In Winter's Shadow" is totally annoying. But it's a fine poem, and a damn good tune. Richard Greene's version is, unsurprisingly, totally gorgeous.

So. Turn off your lights. Go outside. Look at the moon. Then come in, light a candle, and put the tune on, and drift off into the otherworld. And at the high point of each musical phrase, imagine antlered men clashing heads, locked in a stately, solemn dance.

The sound of horns clattering.

And, as an extra wintery bonus, some poems:

from FOUR QUARTETS: East Coker by T.S. Eliot

O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark.

The vacant interstellar spaces......

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope

For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love

For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith

But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:

So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

HAIKU by Basho

Turn this way,

I also am lonely

This evening of winter.

from OUR QUIET TIME by Nancy Wood

In our quiet time

We do not speak, because the voices are within us.

It is our quiet time.

We do not walk, because the earth is all within us.

It is our quiet time....

We rest with all of nature....

I AM SINGING THE COLD RAIN

A Cheyenne Poem

I am singing the cold rain

I am singing the winter dawn

I am turning in the gray morning

Of my life

Toward home.

FIRST SNOW by mary oliver

the snow 
began here


this morning and all day


continued,

its white


rhetoric everywhere


calling us back to why,

how,


whence such beauty and what


the meaning;

such


an oracular fever!

flowing 
past windows,

an energy it seemed


would never ebb,

never settle


less than lovely!

and only now,


deep into night,


it has finally ended.

the silence


is immense,


and the heavens still hold


a million candles;

nowhere 
the familiar things:


stars, the moon, 
the darkness

we expect


and nightly turn from.

trees 
glitter like castles


of ribbons, the broad fields


smolder with light, a passing


creekbed lies


heaped with shining hills;

and though the questions


that have assailed us all day


remain--not a single


answer has been found--
walking out now


into the silence and the light


under the trees,


and through the fields,


feels like one.

- from new and selected poems.

Winter Solstice & Abbots Bromley Horn Dance

On Darkness:

The child is born in the darkness of the womb; the chicken hatched after incubation. Birth begins in darkness, as dawn follows the long night, and spring springs from winter. We must not interrupt the incubation period within us, or force it to bear fruit before its time. To pull a seed out of the earth before it sprouts, to open a chrysalis before the emerging butterfly forms its wings may prevent new life from awakening.

- Torrey Philemon

"You darkness, that I come from,

I love you more than all the fires

that fence in the world,

for the fire makes

a circle of light for everyone,

and then no one outside learns of you.

But the darkness pulls in everything;

shapes and fires, animals and myself,

how easily it gathers them!—

powers and people—

and it is possible a great energy

is moving near me.

I have faith in nights."

- Rainer Maria Rilke, On Darkness

Out of darkness, light: Solstice and the lunar eclipse

by Starhawk, 10-20-2010

Winter Solstice--the shortest day and longest night of the year. For Pagans, Wiccans and Goddess worshippers, this is one of our most sacred holidays. As winter closes in, the darkness grows and the light recedes. For Pagans, darkness is the necessary balance to light. We don't conceive of the dark as evil, but as a place of potential, of gestation--the black, fertile soil where the seed puts forth roots and shoots, the dark womb where new life is nurtured. But being humans, we also have a natural affinity for the light, the time of growth and new beginnings, of warmth and color and bright new hopes. Solstice reminds us that no darkness, no loss, no grief or disappointment is final. Out of darkness, light is born. Every ending gives rise to a new beginning. Out of disappointment and despair comes new courage, new hope.

This year, Solstice coincides with a total lunar eclipse. The last time this happened was in 1544. The earth aligns directly with the sun and the moon, casting a shadow on the moon's face. The moon is a Super Moon, at its closest to the earth. And, so my astrologer friends tell me, we are also directly aligned with our Milky Way's Galactic Center, where the galaxy gives birth to stars. We are in a great birth canal, on the night when mythically Mother Night gives birth to the Sun Child of the New Year.

What does this all mean? For those of you who like to align your meditations and your magic with the movements of the stars, we stand tonight between the past and the future. For the first hour and a quarter of the eclipse, (starting at 1:30 am East Coast Standard Time), it's as if we step out of time. We are free of the past, and we can consciously create the future, for ourselves, for our communities, for the earth.

It's a night to take a good look at what you want to shed. What are the behaviors, the beliefs, the patterns that no longer serve? Let them go. Make the commitment to change.

And it's a night to envision the future you want to create. What world do we want to see? How will we step up to face the huge challenges of healing our communities, our economies, our climate and our environment? What risks will we need to take? What will we need to let go of, and what will we need to embrace?

And hey, even if you think all astrology is bunkum, take a moment tonight to go out, to marvel at the moon with the mark of the earth written across her face, to let go of what you no longer need and call in what you want. And if you can do this with friends, and family, in community, with good food and a warm fire and a few candles, and raise a cup of gratitude for all we have and all we share, you may find that the courage, the support, the power, the love and luck you need for this New Year are born in the depths of the night, and awaken at dawn with the rising sun.

A blessed solstice to you all!

And with that in mind I'd like to share with you this special mysterious ancient solstice tradition that was still being performed the last time there was a full-eclipse on a winter solstice, some hundreds of years ago. I'd like to specially dedicate this post to Joski at Merlin's New Rags and Gadaya at the Old Weird America, for their superb scholarly posts and special collections of different versions of ancient folk tunes.

"Besides for solace of our people, and allurement of the savages, we were provided of Musike in good variety not omitting the least toyes, as Morris dancers, Hobby horses, and Maylike conceits to delight the Savage people, whom we intended to winne by all faire means possible."

The Abbots Bromley Horn Dance

The Abbots Bromley Horn Dance is the oldest surviving ritual dance in the northern hemisphere. The dance dates back at least to the early medieval period. The first written record of its performance is from the Barthelmy fair in 1226. Historians have suggested that it celebrates the purchase of hunting rights in Needwood Forest from the Abbot of Bromley, restoring previous Saxon privileges. It is performed every year on Wakes Monday in the village of Abbots Bromley, in the English Midlands. At 8:00 a.m. the horns are taken from the church, where they are kept during the year, and the dancers make their rounds, stopping at various locations throughout the village and its surrounding farms and pubs, a distance of about ten miles. After dancing all day, the horns are returned to the church in the evening.

The Horn Dance team consists of six Deer-men, a Fool, a Hobby Horse, Maid Marion (a man dressed as a woman), a Bowman (Robin Hood or Boy Cupid), and two musicians. The horns are a mystery. They are large reindeer horns mounted on wooden effigies of stags' heads, with the largest pair weighing about 25 pounds. Chemical dating places them at around 1000 years old. Since there are no records of reindeer living in Britain since Neolithic times, there is speculation that these may have been imported especially for the dance. Three of them are painted black, and three brown. Once they were red and white, said to represent the battle between winter and spring, darkness and light.

Does the dance represent a ritual combat between the forces of light and darkness? Or does it reenact a stylized hunt? In primitive societies, the miming of a successful hunt is often used as 'sympathetic magic' to give power over real quarry. The famous wall paintings at Les Trois Frères, France, known as "The Sorcerer" show a naked man dancing in antlers and a deer mask. A carving found at Pin Hole Cave, Creswell Crags, Derbyshire, (known to have been used by Neolithic hunters) portrays a man in an animal headdress. Both suggest that pre-historic shaman used animal disguises in their rituals.

According to the locals, the dance is supposed to bring good fortune to the people and fertility to the crops. In its slow and serpentine windings, is it stirring some ritual magic from a long-forgotten past? There is no way of knowing, and that is part of the enigma of the horn dance.

Although traditionally performed on Wakes Monday, the dance was also performed on other special occasions. For over 400 years now, the leadership of the horn dance has remained in the Bentley family. Although generally performed only by the men, in the 2000 dance Robin Hood was played by a young girl. The mysterious tune generally associated with the dance was first written down in 1857.

There are several theories concerning the roots of this peculiar festival. It may well have begun as a Winter Solstice ritual, but it has also been suggested that it was born when King Henry I (1100-1135 AD) granted hunting rights to the people of the area. The dance was supposed to have been created as a mark of gratitude.

The hunting rights theory is suspect, however, because the Horn Dance shows signs of having had a much earlier, pre-Christian beginning when magic and fertility ceremonies were very much aspects of the lives of ordinary people. It's interesting to note that some of the figures to be seen in the world-famous cave paintings at Lascaux look very like the Abbots Bromley Horn Dancers. These figures are over 20,000 years old, so perhaps the true origins of the dance you can see today at Abbots Bromley are far more ancient than most people realize.

The Abbots Bromley Variations

1. Tony Hall - The Abbot's Bromley Horn Dance

2. Martin & Jessica Simpson & Lisa Ekstrom - Abbotts Bromley Horn Dance/In Winter's Shadow

3. Andrew Cronshaw - Wheelwright Robinson's tune for the Abbots Bromley horn dance

4. Trotto - Abbotts Bromley Horn Dance

5. Leif Alpsjö - The Abbots Bromley

6. Richard Greene & Beryll Mariott - Abbot's Bromley Horn Dance

Tony Hall's and Trotto's versions are probably the most traditional forms of the tune, though one with just tin whistle and drum would be even moreso. And yes, I do realize that Jessica Simpson's voice on "In Winter's Shadow" is totally annoying. But it's a fine poem, and a damn good tune. Richard Greene's version is, unsurprisingly, totally gorgeous.

So. Turn off your lights. Go outside. Look at the moon. Then come in, light a candle, and put the tune on, and drift off into the otherworld. And at the high point of each musical phrase, imagine antlered men clashing heads, locked in a stately, solemn dance.

The sound of horns clattering.

And, as an extra wintery bonus, some poems:

from FOUR QUARTETS: East Coker by T.S. Eliot

O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark.

The vacant interstellar spaces......

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope

For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love

For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith

But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:

So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

HAIKU by Basho

Turn this way,

I also am lonely

This evening of winter.

from OUR QUIET TIME by Nancy Wood

In our quiet time

We do not speak, because the voices are within us.

It is our quiet time.

We do not walk, because the earth is all within us.

It is our quiet time....

We rest with all of nature....

I AM SINGING THE COLD RAIN

A Cheyenne Poem

I am singing the cold rain

I am singing the winter dawn

I am turning in the gray morning

Of my life

Toward home.

FIRST SNOW by mary oliver

the snow 
began here


this morning and all day


continued,

its white


rhetoric everywhere


calling us back to why,

how,


whence such beauty and what


the meaning;

such


an oracular fever!

flowing 
past windows,

an energy it seemed


would never ebb,

never settle


less than lovely!

and only now,


deep into night,


it has finally ended.

the silence


is immense,


and the heavens still hold


a million candles;

nowhere 
the familiar things:


stars, the moon, 
the darkness

we expect


and nightly turn from.

trees 
glitter like castles


of ribbons, the broad fields


smolder with light, a passing


creekbed lies


heaped with shining hills;

and though the questions


that have assailed us all day


remain--not a single


answer has been found--
walking out now


into the silence and the light


under the trees,


and through the fields,


feels like one.

- from new and selected poems.

Portrait of America #1 - Allen Ginsberg

America

by Allen Ginsberg

America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.

America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956.

I can't stand my own mind.

America when will we end the human war?

Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb

I don't feel good don't bother me.

I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind.

America when will you be angelic?

When will you take off your clothes?

When will you look at yourself through the grave?

When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?

America why are your libraries full of tears?

America when will you send your eggs to India?

I'm sick of your insane demands.

When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?

America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.

Your machinery is too much for me.

You made me want to be a saint.

There must be some other way to settle this argument.

Burroughs is in Tangiers I don't think he'll come back it's sinister.

Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?

I'm trying to come to the point.

I refuse to give up my obsession.

America stop pushing I know what I'm doing.

America the plum blossoms are falling.

I haven't read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for murder.

America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.

America I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I'm not sorry.

I smoke marijuana every chance I get.

I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet.

When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.

My mind is made up there's going to be trouble.

You should have seen me reading Marx.

My psychoanalyst thinks I'm perfectly right.

I won't say the Lord's Prayer.

I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.

America I still haven't told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over from Russia.

I'm addressing you.

Are you going to let our emotional life be run by Time Magazine?

I'm obsessed by Time Magazine.

I read it every week.

Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.

I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.

It's always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie producers are serious. Everybody's serious but me.

It occurs to me that I am America.

I am talking to myself again.

Asia is rising against me.

I haven't got a chinaman's chance.

I'd better consider my national resources.

My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals an unpublishable private literature that goes 1400 miles and hour and twentyfivethousand mental institutions.

I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underpriviliged who live in my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns.

I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go.

My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I'm a Catholic.

America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?

I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his automobiles more so they're all different sexes

America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe

America free Tom Mooney

America save the Spanish Loyalists

America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die

America I am the Scottsboro boys.

America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party was in 1835 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother

Bloor made me cry I once saw Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have been a spy.

America you don're really want to go to war.

America it's them bad Russians.

Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.

The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia's power mad. She wants to take our cars from out our garages.

Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader's Digest. her wants our auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations.

That no good. Ugh. Him makes Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers.

Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help.

America this is quite serious.

America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.

America is this correct?

I'd better get right down to the job.

It's true I don't want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts factories, I'm nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.

America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

Kabir, Spirits, & Spices

The Clay Jug

Inside this clay jug there are canyons and pine mountains, and the maker of canyouns and pine mointains!

All seven oceans are inside, and hundreds of millions of stars.

The acid that tests gold is there, and the one who judges jewels.

And the music from the strings no one touches, and the source of all water.

If you want the truth, I will tell you the truth:

Friend, listen: the God whom I love is inside.

- Kabir, trans. Robert Bly

The Unknown Flute

I know the sound of the ecstatic flute,

but I don't know whose flute it is.

A lamp burns and has neither wick nor oil.

A lily pad blossoms and is not attached to the bottom!

When one flower opens, ordinarily dozens open.

The moon bird's head is filled with nothing but thoughts of the moon,

and when the next rain will come is all that the rain bird thinks of.

Who is it we spend our entire life loving?

- Kabir, trans. Robert Bly

Music

Have you heard the music that no fingers enter into?

Far inside the house

entangled music--

What is the sense of leaving your house?

Suppose you scrub your ethical skin until it shines,

but inside there is no music,

then what?

Mohammed's son pores over words, and points out this

and that,

but if his chest is not soaked dark with love,

then what?

The Yogi comes along in his famous orange.

But if inside he is colorless, then what?

Kabir says: Every instant that the sun is risen,

if I stand in the temple, or on a balcony,

in the hot fields, or in a walled garden,

my own Lord is making love with me.

- Kabir, trans. Robert Bly

The Failure

I talk to my inner lover, and I say, why such rush?

We sense that there is some sort of spirit that loves birds and animals and the ants--

perhaps the same one who gave a radiance to you in your mother's womb.

Is it logical you would be walking around entirely orphaned now?

The truth is you turned away yourself,

and decided to go into the dark alone.

Now you are tangled up in others, and have forgotten what you once knew,

and that's why everything you do has some weird failure in it.

- Kabir, trans. Robert Bly

Why Should We Part?

Why should we two ever want to part?

Just as the leaf of the water rhubarb lives floating on the water,

we live as the great one and the little one.

As the owl opens his eyes all night to the moon,

we live as the great one and the little one.

This love between us goes back to the first humans;

it cannot be annihilated.

Here is Kabir's idea: as the river gives itself to the ocean,

what is inside me moves inside you.

- Kabir, trans. Robert Bly

I thought with the sad fate of disappearing blogs, the least I could do is point to a beautiful new blog that's being born:

Spirits & Spices

(and they reminded me how much I like Kabir, and how much I like to do poetry posts)

Ode to a Pair of Socks

Ode to a Pair of Socks

Mara Mori brought me
a pair of socks
which she knitted herself
with her sheepherder’s hands,
two socks as soft as rabbits.
I slipped my feet into them
as if they were two cases
knitted with threads of twilight and goatskin,
Violent socks,
my feet were two fish made of wool,
two long sharks
sea blue, shot through
by one golden thread,
two immense blackbirds,
two cannons,
my feet were honored in this way
by these heavenly socks.
They were so handsome for the first time
my feet seemed to me unacceptable
like two decrepit firemen,
firemen unworthy of that woven fire,
of those glowing socks.
Nevertheless, I resisted the sharp temptation
to save them somewhere as schoolboys
keep fireflies,
as learned men collect
sacred texts,
I resisted the mad impulse to put them
in a golden cage and each day give them
birdseed and pieces of pink melon.
Like explorers in the jungle
who hand over the very rare green deer
to the spit and eat it with remorse,
I stretched out my feet and pulled on
the magnificent socks and then my shoes.

The moral of my ode is this:
beauty is twice beauty
and what is good is doubly good
when it is a matter of two socks
made of wool in winter.

-Pablo Neruda (translated by Robert Bly)

I know... a bit out of season... but it's good all the same...

Winter

Winter


And the waves
gush pearls
from their snowy throats
as they come
leaping
over the moss-green,
black-green,
glass-green roughage ---
as they crumble
on the incline
scattering
whatever they carry
in their invisible
and motherly
hands:
stones,
seaweed,
mussels
icy and plump
with waled shells,
waiting
for the gatherers
who come flying
on their long white wings---
who comes walking,
who comes muttering:
thank you,
old dainties,
dark wreckage,
coins of the sea
in my pockets
and plenty for the gulls
and the wind still pounding
and the sea still streaming in like a mother wild with gifts---
in this world I am as rich
as I need to be.

- Mary Oliver

some thoughts & Max Ochs

I recently came across this interview with Max Ochs (brother of Phil Ochs, and featured in that American Primitive Guitar comp). He says a lot of cool things, including this perspective on the contemporary state of music accessibility:

Touching on the access that recorded music allowed to the other genres that influenced you back in the ’50s, what do you think of the current state of digital music, and the unprecedented access that the Internet has allowed?

I think it’s wonderful, and I think it should be free. I have lots of cassettes of myself playing at a coffee house, of me playing at somebody’s house or at a gig, or at bar, or just sitting in the living room with a bunch of guys and somebody turns on the tape recorder and made a copy for me. And I have a ton of homemade music that I would love to post to a Web site and be like Radiohead, you know, what they did with their last album where they said to download and pay us whatever you think it’s worth. If you wanna take it for free, if you wanna give me a dollar, fifty cents, whatever, it’s fine. And I would really be quite content to do that.

As far as musicians making a living off of selling a record is concerned, do you think that particular model of digital distribution is a good direction for music to be taking?

People are going to get their music one way or another — they have a hunger, an appetite for it. They’re gonna find music and there’s so much of it now. I mean, the Beatles are never gonna disappear — Beethoven, Bach, Blind Willie Johnson, John Fahey — they’re never gonna disappear, they’re here for the rest of civilization’s existence. So it’s a cumulative thing, new musicians will come up and find ways to get their stuff on iTunes that can be downloaded.

But people say, “Don’t you wanna get money for your CD’s?” Well actually, I would be happy if people were listening to my music, at least to the extent that people would invite me to come play at a concert. But even when I wasn’t playing at gigs or at venues, I was still sitting in my kitchen playing for my dog, or on my back steps — I just love to play. I’m not worried about the music industry, it will find a way, it will sort itself out. There will be ways for musicians to make money, you’ll get played for playing when you go to a gig, and the musicians will sell their records at the gigs, and maybe musicians will adopt that Radiohead mode where they put it on the internet and if people want their music, they can download it and pay what they think is fair to pay, what they think it’s worth.

But here’s the other thing: You’re talking to a non-typical musician. Most of the time when you interview a musician, they’re doing it for a living, they’ve committed themselves full-time and they’re really brave leaping into that experience where they’re going to try to see if they can make it as a musician. I never had that much faith in myself, that I could be that competitive in the market. I play just because it brings me great joy, and I’m just grateful that people like to listen. I worked in the anti-poverty agency at a steady job and when I could find the time I would practice my music and write a song, and if I was lucky, I would get a gig. That’s how I bumbled through decades, and all this that’s going on now is wonderful and interesting. It’s like now I’ve been validated to the extent that it seems people enjoy listening to me, and it’s amazing, and great, and I’m so happy that they do.

...

which pretty much sums up how I relate to it, as a musician as well.

Max has a new album out. It's called Hooray for Another Day. The guitar pieces are very unique. And there's some poetry, somewhat in the vein of The Microphones. I'm not nuts about his singing, and you're not going to be blown away by his technique, but the album's definitely worth hearing for the individuality and humanity in the guitar-playing. And in that spirit, you can either buy it from Tompkins Square or pinch it here.

and read this interview with Max at Tompkins Square

cool beans!

For all you splendid singles...

Absolutely Clear


Don't surrender your loneliness
So quickly.
Let it cut more deep.

Let it ferment and season you
As few human
Or even divine ingredients can.

Something missing in my heart tonight
Has made my eyes so soft,
My voice
So tender,

My need of God
Absolutely
Clear.

--Hafiz, translated by Daniel Ladinsky





Out of everything I've done, everything I've lost,
everything I've gotten unexpectedly,
I can give you a little in leaves, in sour iron...
here I am with the thing that loses stars,
like a vegetable, alone.

-- Pablo Neruda, translated by Robert Bly





I am too alone in the world, and not alone enough to make every moment holy.
I am too tiny in this world, and not tiny enough just to lie before you like a thing,
shrewd and secretive.
I want my own will, and I want simply to be with my will,
as it goes toward action,
and in the silent, sometimes hardly moving times
when something is coming near,
I want to be with those who know secret things
or else alone.

-- Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Robert Bly





Sometimes I go about pitying myself,
and all the time
I am being carried on great winds across the sky.
-- a Chippewa wild woman





Beneath my chest there is a room
with two chairs and a fewtherbed.
On the table, a solitary candle burns
and the curtains are drawn open to the garden and its moon.

Your place is set, my love
with sweet wine, soup and spoon.
But no grace was spoken
over my ravaged plate.

The candle flickers and the curtains are pulled in.
It is late and my bed beckons.
As I turn from your chair I ask the night
who I will lay with 'till morning.

The wind comes in with a birdsong
But not the one I waited for--
It's the bird who sings at night
In a garden beneath my chest.

- Oct.5, 2008





We sense there is some sort of spirit that loves birds and the animals and the ants--
Perhaps the same one who gave a radiance to you in your mother's womb.
Is it logical you would be walking around entirely orphaned now?
The truth is you turned away yourself,
and decided to go into the dark alone.

--Kabir