Some Olde Matters Offered Anew for Consideration & Comment

–”The intellectual should constantly disturb, should bear
witness to the misery of the world, should be provocative
by being independent, should rebel against all hidden and
open pressures and manipulations ,should be the chief doubter of systems…and for this reason, an intellectual cannot fit into any role that might be assigned to him…and essentially doesn’t belong anywhere: he stands out as an irritant wherever he is.”
–Vaclav Havel, quoted by Alan Clements, *Aung San Suu Kyi, The Voice of Hope*
(Seven Stories Press, 1997), p. 121

–”…We will try it out with you, ye that have harried and held,
Ye that have bullied and bribed, tyrants, hypocrites, liars!”
–Padraic (Patrick Henry) Pearse (1879-1916)

–”If there is one tall pine-tree standing, the forest has not ended…”
Olde Tibetan saying

Comment / Excerpts from my set in prison play, “The Bitter Gall of Heaven”:

P.S. At K[.]’s insistence I’m attempting a coupla freelance articles–one, in particular, about the “p.c.” degradation of Celtic culture at the cynical hands of some Irish “shcuk and jive” plantations of olde! collaborator-types…

Oh, and yes, I have new ideas for the play, the play…, a section in which “O.G.” claims black people never get any respect–i.e., “when they gave us a street, for Dr. King, did we get a fancy “Ave-ah-new”? Hell no! We got a measly “boulevard”…One Latino comments about “hey, we gotta “Cesar Chavez Avenue in L.A., man” …O.G. says, “Ya see what I mean!” …Mr. Big says, “Well, brother, I don’t want to be the one to break the bad news to you, but in Oakland, we micks are getting a fucking alleyway for our great-hearted warrior, Gerry Adams, and the two-faced politicians are even trying to weasel outta that tidbit scrap from the table”…Speed [or the musician, Chuck/Flattop?] chiming in with, “Yeah, in San Francisco, all they gave the King of the Beats, Jack Kerouac, is this dinky-ass back street full of garbage cans and bums’ piss…

Excerpts from a 1997 “Rudra Rant” to Maxine:

Helen Vendler, commenting on the Toni Morrison’s of the “multi-cultural” scene (too often, ironically enough, merely “looking for me”; Ms. Vendler cites the plethora of tales beginning with “I never found literature meaningful til I read [ for a woman, Jane Eyre, for a black, Invisible Man, etc...]: “And if it was not literally true when I said, ‘They have pierced my hands and my feet; they have numbered all my bones,’ I knew it was metaphorically true of all suffering, my own included. Metaphor, not minesis, was my native realm.” (Soul Says, On Recent Poetry, Harvard U. Press, 1995, intro. at 3)

From Ms. Lanier’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (“Hail God, King of the Jews”):
(to the Virtuous Reader)
Eve’s Apology in Defense of Women

–”Often have I heard, that it is the property of some women, not only to emulate the virtues and perfections of the rest, but also by all their powers of ill speaking, to eclipse the brightness of their deserved fame…And this have I done, to make known to the world, that all women deserve not to be blamed though some forgetting they are women themselves, and in danger to be condemned by the words of their own mouths, fall into so great an error, so as to speak unadvisedly against the rest of their sex…such points of folly, [as is] practiced by evil disposed men, who forgetting they were born of women, nourished of women, and that if it were not by the means of women, they would be extinguished out of the world, and a final end of them all, do like vipers deface the wombs wherein they were bred, only to give way and utterance to their want of discretion and goodness. Such as these, were they that dishonored Christ his Apostles and Prophets, putting them to shameful deaths. Therefore we are not to regartd any imputations, that they undeservedly lay upon us, not otherwise than to make use of them to our own benefits, as spur to virtue, making us fly to all occasion that may color their unjust speeches to pass current. Especially considering that they have tempted even the patience of God himself, who gave power to wise and virtuous women, to bring down their pride and arrogancy. As was cruel Cesarus by the discreet counsel of noble Deborah, judge and prophetess of Israel: and resolution of Jael wife of Heber the Kenite: wicked Haman, by the divine prayers and prudent proceedings of beautiful Hester: blasphemous Holofernes, by the invincible courage, rare wisdom, and confident carriage of Jedeth: and the unjust Judges, by the innocency of chaste Susanna: with infinite others, which for brevity’s sake I will omit…” (intro,Norton Anthology, supra, p. 41)

According to The Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the U.S., ed. by Cathy N. Davidson and Linda Wagner-Martin (Oxford U. Press, 1995), heterosexism is a term that “emerged out of the combined traditions of the feminist and the gay/lesbian liberation movements. Building on the root word sexism, it implies the efforts of both a system of gender inequality and compulsory heterosexuality, and emphasizesthe way these two forms of oppression are often crucially and inextricably linked…(Katie Kent)” Under heterosexuality, “in the 1970’s, feminists produced a powerful analysis of instituionailzed heterosexuality which not only addressed the social privileges and legal rights accrued by heterosexual women but also the virtual omnipresence of heterosexual images in American culture. (Kate Cummings)” Plus a blurb about Michel Foucalt, A History of Sexuality, arguing that “sexual identity” is “repressive” per se…[What these "deconstructuralists" (another is Derrida) fail to "cop" to the "open" allegiances this "philosophy" owes to National Socialistic Third Reich propagandists--like the Marxist Josef Goebbels, who proclaimed a "legal, spiritual and historical revolution" made possible through "re-education" by "obedience to the Fuhrer's dictates"]

–Seems to me that an infamous quote from that thin-skinned rhu-barbaroi, Adolph Hitler, has to do with the power of radio, then a new addition to technology, being “wickedly great,” in that by *its* constant pounding of rhyming, simplistic phrases into the public consciousness,Heaven itself can be seen as the most sordid place…, and, the mucky and murky dissemblance “offered” instead, despite the “ever widening gyre” nature of *distortions*, made to seem a panacea towards which the fear torched nostrils of group-ego!  madly stampede…

-Finally a wee bit from No One Left to Lie To, by Christopher Hitchens (Verso, New Left Books, 1999):

“Hannah Arendt once wrote that the great success of Stalinism among the intellectuals could be attributed to one annihilating tactic.  Stalinism replaced all debate about the merit of an argument or position, or even a person, with an inquiry about motive. I can attest, in a minor key, to the effect of this tactic in smaller matters…The truth or otherwise of what I said was not disputed so much as ignored.  When the finger points at the moon, as the Chinese say, the idiot looks at the finger!” (p. 112)

–”In June 1908. during a performance of [Wagner's] *Walkure*, a
melee broke out in [Vienna's]  Court Opera’s gallery…The
*Alldeutches Tagblatt* described the event in an article
entitled ‘Jewish Insolence in the Court Opera’ as follows: ‘A
number of crooked-nosed Wagnerians, their nice thick skulls
(catheads) delicately and charmingly bedecked with black negro
wool (homo negroides )[ aspersions  of homosexuality omitted], thought
it was a good opportunity to indulge in boisterous
demonstrations…But they reckoned without their host, for no
sooner had one of these princes of darkness opened his jaws and
bawled a little then he received a forceful box on his ear,
delivered by a son of the Muses, who had powerfully built up his
strength on the fencing ground.  For a few minutes, brave
students had a lot to do to leave their marks on all those
Jewish faces and literally to throw the bones belonging to them
out the door’.”
Brigitte Hamann, *Hitler’s Vienna* (Oxford U.
Press, 1999), pp. 64-5.

*    *    *
[Excerpts from a 1999 Rudra Rant]:

As I’m studying Seutonis , Twelve Caesars, again in search of rhetorical guidance to edit and finish “The Complaint,”

I’ll briefly cite an analogy from not that many decades after the Hubris of Julius Caesar (who knew how to parlay the opinions of the common man into power very shrewdly), upset at having his allegedly “divine” status questioned by his mere underlings, “lean and hungry” as Cassius, entered the Temple of Jove and “shook his fist” at the statue of the one they considered the Heavenly Father (to “deep belly roars ” from High Above and a  “causing of his fist to twist and curl into an epileptic seizure” while marble shattered and cascaded about the panic-stricken J.C.”: The Romans became big on “public works projects” as a way of keeping their slaves’ “idle hands” busy, and built all these great roads leading into the Beltway of Rome…Well, wasn’t long before some glinting-eyed barbaroi, as they were known, walked into Rome after token opposition.  All that booty and plunder…Then the “senators”  were discovered–hiding behind the cold statues of their predecessors in The Forum…Forgot where I found the description, but the phrasing was a bit like “faces angrily screwed up,” the pale, flabby bodies trembling in togas–one stamping the “staff of Jove” against the smooth marble floor, waiting for the hollow echoes to die down, then demanding to know why the laughing invaders weren’t humbling themselves before them, “We’re the Romans, you can’t do this to us”…

[New addition from my further research of Brecht, a person whom I've always found a bit despicable--although keeping my opinions to myself in my younger, more "foolish," politically correct days, as he's one of The Socialist Icons!:

"Hindenberg had been prevailed upon to appoint Hitler as chencellor in a cabinet where Nfazi members would be a small minority. Papen declared of Hitler, 'No danger at all. We've hired him for our act'...on the day of Hitler's ascension as chancellor, Goebbels, with his great gift for blending the political with the dazzlingly theatrical and pseudo-religious in what he called 'divine services,' arranged to have twenty-five thousand uniformed Nazis, carrying flickering torches and with accompanying military music, march down Unter den Linden, through the Braudenburg Gate, past the chancellery where Hitler could be seen at a lighted window...As they marched past with an endless stream of swastika-bedecked banners, at a window of the chancellery, the eighty-six-year-old president of the Republic, Hindenberg, was seen looking out, 'abstractly pounding his cane in time to the music of the bands.' The parade continued from seven in the evening until midnight. Goebbels summed up his propaganda coup as 'this night of the great miracle' that had ended 'in an insensate tumult of enthusiasm.' Hitler stayed up until dawn and told his closest followers this night marked the start of 'the greatest ...revolution in world history [alluding as well to the Christ's "Resurrection"]

…”On Februrary 24, [1933] Goring pushed legislation through the Reichstag to have SA and SS formations throughout Germany sworn in as auxillary police units…[Q]uoting Shakespeare, the parliamentary president boasted, ‘My measures will not be sicklied o’er by any legal scruples. It’s not my business to do justice, it’s my business to annihilate and exterminate’ (emp. added)”

John Fuegi, Brecht & Co. Sex, Politics and the Making of Modern Drama, (Grove 1994), p. 285-6

(A further footnote: the woman’s name who wrote the 3-Penny was Elisabeth Hauptmann, who in one letter exasperatingly tried to explain to the deliberately blockhead Bertie Brecht, Baby!, that she was “neither a call girl nor a lady of luxury,” i.e., “could use a little money for all my creative work, you thankless ungrateful monster!”…Another woman who I’m told skewered Herr Brecht, ole Stalin’s “best pal” in driving the talent to “commit suicide, it’s you only option at this [big mustachioed grinning] point!” (given one-quarter of a million dollars for said “artistic matters” by Stalin personally at one “Hitler-Stalin Pact” point was the acttress Elsa Lanchester, married (for convenience) to the homosexual Charlie Laughton, who took Bertie cross-country in his limo, baby!…)

*    *    *

–’Petty people imitating others will use this in a perverse and sinister way, even getting to the point where they can destroy families and usurp countries.  Without wisdom and knowledge, you cannot preserve your home with justice and cannot preserve your country with the way.’
re: *tsung-heng-hsuen from ‘The Master of Demon Valley,’
18,19, a classic Taoist text translated by Thomas Cleary,
‘Thunder in the Sky’ (Shambhala, 1993)

–”Those who fail to cultivate the inner meaning and concentrate instead on the outward expression never stop indulging in ignorance, hatred and evil while exhausting  themselves to no avail.  They can deceive others with postures, remain shameless before sages and vain before mortals, but they’ll never escape the Wheel, much less achieve any merit.”
Ta Mo (Bodhidharma), “Breakthrough Sermon” (Red Pine trans.)

*    *    *

[About the Irish  warrior Cuchulainn’s “plain of ill-luck”]:

–The Morrigu’s appearance in his life was one such incident. Abed and asleep in comfort with his wife Emer, one day Cu Chu Lainn heard a cry “so terrible and fearful” that he was awakened with “full-eyed instincts.” Outside a loutish overgrown goon stood next to a chariot drawn by a one-legged horse. At the helm was the Morrigu, claiming to be a “female satirist,” and, knowing Cu Chu Lainn’s reknown in said matter, boasting that she’d won a bonny cow in tow as a prize for one of her poems. Rather than read the poem as he requests she insults him and baits him into one of his “warrior paroxysms,” another matter of renown. When she springs to the tree as a raven, he realizes the reason he’s on-guard–she’s the Morrigu on a scouting mission. Next she tries the “guilt trip” approach–knowing, too, his passion for Justice–claiming most falsely, that he’s “done” something that will bring him ill luck!, and that, in one year’s time, she’ll be the eel that ensnares his feet at a ford while he’s fighting for his life and has no time for foolery…(Summarized from Tain bo Regamna in Eleanor Hull’s The Cuchullin Saga in Irish Literature, (London, 1898) with mine own commentary.)

Now, Cu Chu Lainn is no “foolish little boy” where women are concerned; as Moyra Caldecott, in Women in Celtic Myth, (Destiny Books, Vermont, 1988, 1992), points out. Besides the devotion of his wife, Emer, Cu Chu Lainn earned that of Queen Cathrach Catuchenn of Spain, who abandoned her throne to come and be one of his “woman warriors,” dying nobly in battle. Blanad sought his help from an imprisioning marriage. Fand the Sidh was enchanted with his Fenian physique. So, Maeve, Aoife, the rival of Scathach, and the weakening spells of Macha, perhaps could be said to have been “jealous” when stirring up agent provacateurs like Calatin’s one-eyed triplets (whom Cu Chu Lainn had made fatherless in battle) to froth with resentment and make attempts at murder most foul…

—And one might say that Cu Chu Lainn, in all his youthful good looks and “easy ways” with women, was being given ‘knowledge” of the nature of female! in the same way that Jungian scholars like James Hillman have described the archetypal mythos of male as puer/senex. The dichotomy used to describe the failure of men to maturate, in that the “eternal Peter Pan,” declining the challenge of being male by the default of “avoidance,” becomes the frustrated cynic bitterly destroying the spring of young men rather than assisting the initiations of youth as a tribal elder.

—Forgive yet another typical Rudra digression but I’m afraid that, as an Homeric scholar and lover of saturae, the hodgepodge of personal banter and brutal satire made popular by, say, Ennius, The Father of Latin Poetry, I have to report this matter to be too deeply engrained. From The Great Mother, by Erich Neumann (Bollingen Series XLVII, 1991 ed.): “…the Terrible Female is a symbol for the unconscious. And the dark side of the Terrible Mother takes the form of monsters, whether in Egypt of India, Mexico or Etruria, Bali or Rome. In the myths and tales of all peoples, ages, and countries–and even in the nightmares of our own nights–witches and vampires, ghouls and specters, assail us, all terrifyingly alike…Thus the womb of the earth becomes the deadly devouring maw of the underworld, and beside the fecundated womb and the protecting cave of earth and mountain gapes the abyss of hell, the dark note of the depths, the devouring womb of the grave and of death, of darkness without light, of nothingness.” (p. 148-9)

“It is in India that the experience of the Terrible Mother has been given its most grandiose form as Kali, ‘dark, devouring time, the bone-wreathed Lady of the place of skulls.’…But all this–and it should not be forgotten–is an image not only of the Feminine but particularly and specifically of the Maternal. For in a profound way life and birth are always bound up with death and destruction. That is why this Terrible Mother is ‘Great,’ and this name is also given to Ta-urt, the gravid monster, which is hippopotamus and crocodile, lioness and woman, in one. She too is deadly and protective. There is a frightening likeness to Hathor, the good cow goddess…”(Ibid, at 150).

—Here we have the crux of the connundrum. The Morrigu is the emblem of sterility!. Her interest in Cu Chu Lainn, the Irish Heracles (Pride of Hera, the Brown Silken Doe-Eyes Misting with Tears), is merely predatory. Another encounter with Cu Chu Lainn has her posing as an old hag milking a magical three-teated cow to offer the dusty and wearied warrior milk, knowing that for the “simple act of kindness” he will bless her–which he does, healing her blindness, one of the unfortunate side effects of power-mongering sorcery–her hoping further for his Light of Foresight! a deceit which came to naught. Morrigu is thus like what Neumann depicts as “the Monster wielding the Terrible Knife,” from the Papyrus of Nu, Egypt, akin, in my interpretation, to the female equivalent of Cerberus the Three-Headed Yet No-Brained Hangdog of what may be seen as the Hell Bardo. She guards the Underworld Gates with her long snake-tongue rigidly clamped in a crocodile snout face frozen with a Cheshire Cat! like *grin*, her breasts dangling like missle torpedos, most useless, from the body all furry, Kundrie-like with clunky, dinosaur thighs.

—Whereas in the Native American myth the hero’s challenge is to “break the teeth” from the vagina of such a one existing in spiritual degradation, and thereby make her whole as a woman again whose wisdom has earned respect, in this case nothing will do.

–One might add Lamia, daughter of Belus, allegedly of Zeus, the Libyan “Neith,” Love-and-Battle goddess, to this pantheon. Instead of the noble Athene, shining forth with wisdom, one gets lamyros (“gluttonous”) and laimos (“gullet”), a creature reduced to an ugly, Gorgon countenance by her sadomasochistic delight in the sodomistic suffering of others (akin to Boudicea and her Count Dracula-like, “Vlad the Gay Impaler,” use of wooden staves to slowly kill her female enemies), especially children, for being of youth and innocence. Allegedly part of the Empusae, a female cult that seduced men and sucked their blood as they slept, these females, like the Amazons of the Libyan Gulf of Sirte and their “sisters” now being found as remains in Eurasia, really existed. As Plutarch and others have noted, they were indeed really dangerous,too, for the Taurian Artemis of Crimea and her Black Sea Kult of Hecate, armed priestesses formed to “avenge” that Mummer-no-king Agememnon’s sacrificing of his own daughter as “penance” for his own “mish-takes,” became the buccanneering terrors of the high seas for a period of time, the savage throat-slitting and drinking of male blood–especially that of exceptionally handsome boys of noble birth, they tossed the females to their dirty tricks male minions–frightening even no-nonsence types like the Roman Consul Pompey (50 or so B.C.), taking the path of Theseus his forebearer, who ended the cults of ritual sodomizing and prostitution of virgin girls at Crete with Phonos hekonsios, “justifiable homicide.”

*    *    *

“But when men were increasingly driven from the fields and were deprived of the possibility of working and of their livelihood and forced to wander homeless, they began to covet the wealth of others and to sell their services along with their loyalty. So gradually a people, which had been a ruling people and governed the world, fell from its position and instead of ruling as a body bound itself as individuals to servitude…”
–An anonymous political pamphlet, disguised, to avoid en-trouble-ment for the hot-headed author (rumoured to have been the very real Marc Antony) as: Saullust, Epistula ad Caeserem, ii, 5, 4-5

“In the name of Heaven, Catalina, how long do you propose to exploit our patience?… In the whole of Italy there is not one single poisoner, gladiator, robber, assassin, will-forger, cheat, glutton, wastrel, adulterer, prostitute, corrupter of youth, or youth who has been corrupted, indeed any nasty individual of any kind whatever, who would not be obliged to admit he has been Catalina’s intimate…”
–Cicero, Against Lucius Sergius Catalina

–Celtic historian Michael Grant, in Gladiators (Harmondsworth, 1970), lists the ancient Roman practice of gladiatoral munera [huge prizes and betting on the arena contests] in the same league as National Socialism–both even worse than Genghis Khan–as “the two most quantitatively destructive institutions in history”(p.8).

–”I shall not call for help until they coffin me–
What good for me to call when hope of help is gone?
Princes of Munster who would have heard my cry
Will not rise from the dead because I am alone.

Mind shudders like a wave in this tempestuous mood,
My bowels and my heart are pierced and filled with pain
To see our lands, our hills, our gentle neighborhood,
A plot where any English upstart stakes his claim.

The Shannon and the Liffey and the tuneful Lee,
The Boyne and the Black Watera sad music sing,
The waters of the west run red into the sea–
No matter what be trumps, their knave will beat our King.

And I can never cease weeping these useless tears;
I am a man oppressed, afflicted and undone.
Who where he wanders mourning no companion hears
Only some waterfall that has no cause to mourn.

Now I shall cease, death comes, and I must not delay.
By Laune and Laine and Lee, diminished of their pride,
I shall go after the heroes, aye, into the clay–
My fathers followed theirs before Christ was crucified.”
Last Lines, Egan O’Rahilly (1670-1726),
trans. Frank O’Connor
–about the breaking of sworn oath, the “Treaty of Limerick,”
1691, resulting in the enslavement of the native Catholics,
the attaintment of their noble lineages…The roots of too much
“modern” troubles…

the original art work of the Titanic…

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“Ship of Fools (Redux)”…A new giclee print by Tamo (July, 2007)

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