Part I.

On either side the river lie
Long fields of barley and of rye,
That clothe the wold and meet the sky;
And thro' the field the road runs by
	  To many-tower'd Camelot;
And up and down the people go,
Gazing where the lilies blow
Round an island there below,
	  The island of Shalott.

Willows whiten, aspens quiver,
Little breezes dusk and shiver
Thro' the wave that runs for ever
By the island in the river
	  Flowing down to Camelot.
Four gray walls, and four gray towers,
Overlook a space of flowers,
And the silent isle imbowers
	  The Lady of Shalott.

By the margin, willow-veil'd
Slide the heavy barges trail'd
By slow horses; and unhail'd
The shallop flitteth silken-sail'd
	  Skimming down to Camelot:
But who hath seen her wave her hand?
Or at the casement seen her stand?
Or is she known in all the land,
	  The Lady of Shalott?

Only reapers, reaping early
In among the bearded barley,
Hear a song that echoes cheerly
From the river winding clearly,
	  Down to tower'd Camelot:
And by the moon the reaper weary,
Piling sheaves in uplands airy,
Listening, whispers "'Tis the fairy
	  Lady of Shalott."

	     Part II.

There she weaves by night and day
A magic web with colours gay.
She has heard a whisper say,
A curse is on her if she stay
	  To look down to Camelot.
She knows not what the curse may be,
And so she weaveth steadily,
And little other care hath she,
	  The Lady of Shalott.

And moving thro' a mirror clear
That hangs before her all the year,
Shadows of the world appear.
There she sees the highway near
	  Winding down to Camelot:
There the river eddy whirls,
And there the surly village-churls,
And the red cloaks of market girls,
	  Pass onward from Shalott.

Sometimes a troop of damsels glad,
An abbot on an ambling pad,
Sometimes a curly shepherd-lad,
Or long-hair'd page in crimson clad,
	  Goes by to tower'd Camelot;
And sometimes thro' the mirror blue
The knights come riding two and two:
She hath no loyal knight and true,
	  The Lady of Shalott.

But in her web she still delights
To weave the mirror's magic sights,
For often thro' the silent nights
A funeral, with plumes and lights
	  And music, went to Camelot:
Or when the moon was overhead,
Came two young lovers lately wed;
"I am half-sick of shadows," said
	  The Lady of Shalott.

	     Part III.

A bow-shot from her bower-eaves,
He rode between the barley-sheaves,
The sun came dazzling thro' the leaves,
And flamed upon the brazen greaves
	  Of bold Sir Lancelot.
A redcross knight for ever kneel'd
To a lady in his shield,
That sparkled on the yellow field,
	  Beside remote Shalott.

The gemmy bridle glitter'd free,
Like to some branch of stars we see
Hung in the golden Galaxy.
The bridle-bells rang merrily
	  As he rode down to Camelot:
And from his blazon'd baldric slung
A mighty silver bugle hung,
And as he rode his armour rung,
	  Beside remote Shalott.

All in the blue unclouded weather
Thick-jewell'd shone the saddle-leather,
The helmet and the helmet-feather
Burn'd like one burning flame together,
	  As he rode down to Camelot.
As often thro' the purple night,
Below the starry clusters bright,
Some bearded meteor, trailing light,
	  Moves over still Shalott.

His broad clear brow in sunlight glow'd;
On burnish'd hooves his war-horse trode;
From underneath his helmet flow'd
His coal-black curls as on he rode,
	  As he rode down to Camelot.
From the bank and from the river
He flash'd into the crystal mirror,
"Tirra lirra," by the river
	  Sang Sir Lancelot.

She left the web, she left the loom,
She made three paces thro' the room,
She saw the water-lily bloom,
She saw the helmet and the plume,
	  She look'd down to Camelot.
Out flew the web and floated wide;
The mirror crack'd from side to side;
"The curse is come upon me," cried
	  The Lady of Shalott.

	     Part IV.

In the stormy east-wind straining,
The pale-yellow woods were waning,
The broad stream in his banks complaining,
Heavily the low sky raining
	  Over tower'd Camelot;
Down she came and found a boat
Beneath a willow left afloat,
And round about the prow she wrote
	  The Lady of Shalott.

And down the river's dim expanse--
Like some bold seër in a trance,
Seeing all his own mischance--
With a glassy countenance
	  Did she look to Camelot.
And at the closing of the day
She loosed the chain, and down she lay;
The broad stream bore her far away,
	  The Lady of Shalott.

Lying, robed in snowy white
That loosely flew to left and right--
The leaves upon her falling light--
Thro' the noises of the night
	  She floated down to Camelot:
And as the boat-head wound along
The willowy hills and fields among,
They heard her singing her last song,
	  The Lady of Shalott.

Heard a carol, mournful, holy,
Chanted loudly, chanted lowly,
Till her blood was frozen slowly,
And her eyes were darken'd wholly,
	  Turn'd to tower'd Camelot;
For ere she reach'd upon the tide
The first house by the water-side,
Singing in her song she died,
	  The Lady of Shalott.

Under tower and balcony,
By garden-wall and gallery,
A gleaming shape she floated by,
A corse between the houses high,
	  Silent into Camelot.
Out upon the wharfs they came,
Knight and burgher, lord and dame,
And round the prow they read her name,
	  The Lady of Shalott.

Who is this? and what is here?
And in the lighted palace near
Died the sound of royal cheer;
And they cross'd themselves for fear,
	  All the knights at Camelot:
But Lancelot mused a little space;
He said, "She has a lovely face;
God in his mercy lend her grace,
	  The Lady of Shalott."

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 1842

• I am a part of all that I have met.  ~Alfred Lord Tennyson
• Even a clock that does not work is right twice a day.  ~Polish Proverb
• Losing an illusion makes you wiser than finding a truth.  ~Ludwig Börne
• Sometimes it's necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly.  ~Edward Albee
• By daily dying I have come to be.  ~Theodore Roethke
• If you think you're free, there's no escape possible.  ~Ram Dass
• The fly that doesn't want to be swatted is most secure when it lights on the fly-swatter.  ~G.C. Lichtenberg
• Each forward step we take we leave some phantom of ourselves behind.  ~John Lancaster Spalding
• No matter where you go or what you do, you live your entire life within the confines of your head.  ~Terry Josephson
• The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself.  ~Bertrand Russell
• You cannot step into the same river twice.  ~Heraclitus, in Diogenes Laertius, Lives
• What deep wounds ever closed without a scar?  ~George Gordon, Lord Byron, Child Harold's Pilgrimage
• Seeking is not always the way to find.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827
• It takes all the running you can do just to keep in the same place.  ~Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, 1872
• We waste a lot of time running after people we could have caught by just standing still.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960
• You become responsible forever for what you've tamed.  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince, 1943, translated from French by Richard Howard
• The scars you can't see are the hardest to heal.  ~Astrid Alauda
• Our greatest pretenses are built up not to hide the evil and the ugly in us, but our emptiness.  The hardest thing to hide is something that is not there.  ~Eric Hoffer, Passionate State of Mind, 1955
• A thing, until it is everything, is noise, and once it is everything it is silence.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin
• Admiration and familiarity are strangers.  ~George Sand
• No snowflake ever falls in the wrong place.  ~Zen
• The moment a little boy is concerned with which is a jay and which is a sparrow, he can no longer see the birds or hear them sing.  ~Eric Berne
• The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.  ~Aldous Huxley
• If I am not pleased with myself, but should wish to be other than I am, why should I think highly of the influences which have made me what I am?  ~John Lancaster Spalding
• Before I travelled my road I was my road.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin
• The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth - that the error and truth are simply opposite.  They are nothing of the sort.  What the world turns to, when it is cured on one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one.  ~H.L. Mencken
• When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.  ~John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra, 1911
• You can't fall off the floor.  ~Author Unknown
• In general people experience their present naively, as it were, without being able to form an estimate of its contents; they have first to put themselves at a distance from it - the present, that is to say, must have become the past - before it can yield points of vantage from which to judge the future.  ~Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion

Though In Memorium was written nine years BEFORE Charles Darwin's Origin of Species (1859), Canto 56 of the poem has long been thought of as a kind of poetic response to the theory of evolution, for it is here that Tennyson coins the phrase NATURE RED IN TOOTH AND CLAW and bemoans the great and fearful lapses of time that the new science of geology was uncovering, and the extinct species being discovered

From scarped [steep] cliff and quarried stone.

In the popular imagination, the great lapses of geological time, the extinct species found in rocks, and "nature red in tooth and claw" have often functioned as a shorthand summing up of what organic evolution by natural selection means---and carries with it the implication that belief in evolution is dangerous to any religious ethic based on love of one's neighbor, for it implies that individuals who practice such an ethic are acting contrary to nature, and what nature teaches us about our own short-lived insignificance in the universe, and thus are fools.

Some scientists, concerned with the popular and reductive summing up of nature as indifferent and "red in tooth and claw," have tried to set some distance between Tennyson's canto and evolution, noting that the same nature that fosters competition also fosters cooperation among organisms, and even evolves animals capable of deep affection and love for one another, as Tennyson had for his best friend.

Other scientists, like Oxford's Richard Dawkins, while having no quarrel with the notion that evolution, over its eons of operation, fosters both violence and love, see no reason to distance evolution from Tennyson's "nature red in tooth and claw," for it imaginitively captures something fundamentally true about organisms---and that is that their behavior is, at bottom, self-interested---or selfish. 

Life is always linked, however indirectly, with a strategy for survival---for bringing certain genes, by competition or cooperation, into the next generation. Hence Dawkins writes at the beginning of his brilliant and disturbing classic, The Selfish Gene (1976), and with his characteristic sharpness,

I think "nature red in tooth and claw" sums up our modern understanding of natural selection admirably. (2)

Darwin, in the sixth chapter of his Origin of Species (1859), expressed similar sentiments about nature's fundamental selfishness, as in these three separate places:

The foregoing remarks lead me to say a few words on the protest lately made by some naturalists, against the utilitarian doctrine that every detail of structure has been produced for the good of its possessor. They believe that very many structures have been created for beauty in the eyes of man, or for mere variety. This doctrine, if true, would be absolutely fatal to my theory.

And here:

It is admitted that the rattlesnake has a poison-fang for its own defence and for the destruction of its prey; but some authors suppose that at the same time this snake is furnished with a rattle for its own injury, namely to warn its prey to escape. I would almost as soon believe that the cat curls the end of its tail when prepaing to spring, in order to warn the doomed mouse.

And here:

Natural selection will never produce in a being anything injurious to itself, for natural selection acts solely by and for the good of each. No organ will be formed, as Paley has remarked, for the purpose of causing pain or for doing injury to its possessor. If a fair balance be struck between the good and the evil caused by each part, each will be found on the whole advantageous.

Darwin, in the above passage, makes the body of each organism a kind of mini-Benthamite (Utilitarian) society---or Sim City---engaged in trade-offs that try to achieve, on balance, what is best for the organism's reproductive prospects as a whole. This might entail a mix of aggressive and cooperative strategies. It's an extremely interesting way of thinking metaphorically about each organism's life, and its attempt to bring genes into the next generation.     

And one way to metaphorically characterize this fundamental self-interest and protection is "nature red in tooth and claw."

El conocimiento llega, pero la sabiduría se demora.

(Alfred Lord Tennyson)

Timothy O'Sullivan, "Field Where General Reynolds Fell, Gettysburg," 1863, albumen photograph bound into Alexander Gardner's Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War (photo courtesy Library of Congress)

Some claim that the photographs attributed (and in many cases mis-attributed) to Matthew Brady are the reason the Civil War is more popular than the Revolutionary War in the American imagination. In fact, nearly 150 years later, the in situ portraits of weary-looking officers, the shots of battlefield formations, and the unvarnished records of the post-battle carnage still bring the immediacy of that war to us in a way that illustration techniques cannot.   Although many consider Brady to be the first "photo-journalist," he wasn't actually the first to photograph war. That distinction belongs to Roger Fenton (1819-1869), British chronicler of the Crimean War. During his short 11-year career as a photographer, Fenton photographed all kinds of subjects—portraits, landscapes, the monuments of ancient civilizations. However, it is the collection of 350 "salt-paper" photographs, taken during a brief 3-month period in and around the encampments at Balaklava, for which Fenton is best remembered. 

Roger Fenton, "Into the Shadow of the Valley of Death," 1855, salt-paper photograph (courtesy Library of Congress). Note the cannonballs strewn in the road. This is one of two prints of the same scene—one with, one without cannonballs. Apparently, the one without was taken first. Fenton wouldn't be the last war photographer to doctor a scene. 

By the time Fenton arrived in camp in the spring of 1855, the infamous slaughter of the British cavalry brigades had already been immortalized by Alfred, Lord Tennyson in his "The Charge of the Light Brigade" poem. Still, the Crimean conflict was in full swing and one imagines that Fenton had ample opportunity to record the action of battle and consequences wrought by the war. What kept him from reporting on this angle of the war?

Despite technical advances made in the wake of Louis Daguerre's introduction of his eponymous plate-process, by 1855, plein air photography was still no trivial matter. Transporting heavy equipment required large teams of porters. Fenton himself set sail to the Crimea with more than 30 crates of materials, as well as a portable tinker's cart, which he used as a portable darkroom. Additionally, chemicals in the service of photography were fickle and could prove particularly ruinous in the wilderness.  (John Wesley Powell's 1869 Grand Canyon expedition comes to mind.) Certainly Fenton would have had good technical reasons not to go out in the field. But Brady and others were using the same cumbersome equipment a half a decade later. Perhaps Brady was just a more fearless character, a man who had less qualms about the dangers of setting up shop on the battlefield. Popular legend has it that he got so close to the action at the First Battle of Bull Run he was almost captured. Even Brady, though, backed off the battlefield later in the war, sending assistants like Timothy O'Sullivan to do that more dangerous work. 

Roger Fenton, "Major Halford, 5th Dragoon Guards,"1855, salt-paper photograph (courtesy Library of Congress).  A cavalryman not unlike those of the 4th Dragoon Guards, who met death during the infamous charge into "the Valley of Death." 

Gross military incompetence was a hallmark of the Crimean War. As a result, many thousands of soldiers died, perhaps unnecessarily. Additionally, it was the first war to make tactical use of trenches and blind artillery fire, and troops must have found themselves in horrific situations similar to those of WW1. Although the military deployed rifles with increased range, soldiers could still expect to find themselves in close conflict with the enemy. As tank technology was still to be invented, the cavalry was the primary arm of the forward thrust of military action. Fenton's photographs depict war as if it were a gentlemanly, Victorian-era game; soldiers seem to be preparing for a dress parade.  One cavalryman after another with his steed strikes a contrived and noble pose, though surely even most experienced among them must have been struggling with mind-numbing terror, well aware that a fate similar to that of the "light brigades" might well await each of them.  

It turns out that Fenton, as well as his subjects, was a pawn in the Great Game.  The photographer was sent to the Crimea by the British Government, anxious to shore up perceptions of the very unpopular war. He arrived at the military camps under the strictest of orders —"No dead bodies."    

Does the omission of the darker side of war make Fenton any less a war photographer?   Stay tuned. 

Of Related Interest:

Roger Fenton at the Library of Congress

Charge of the Light Brigade

Crimean War

John Wesley Powell photographs

One great thing about the conference is that I got fed and fed and fed some more (I don't like to cook). I partook of two desserts a day; anything with cream was fair game - and I was prepared to fight till death for it too! Of course, having Teddy with me tended to put anyone off violence at the dessert section. I doubt I gained any weight though; the region is extremely hilly and after schlepping back and forth to the village enough times (no one in Wales seems to know what "schlep" means), not to mention on the campus itself, I probably ended up losing weight. And yes, everyone kept asking me where I put it. I do hope they were referring to the dessert.

On Monday evening, Teddy and I went along on the pub crawl (though I'd already been in my favourite pub the night before - The Hanbury Arms - where Alfred Lord Tennyson apparently went on the piss and where I had my toes bitten - and I'll leave you to ponder that one). On Tuesday I paid yet another visit to the Roman ruins, which has the remains of an amphitheatre. It was a perfect day, the clouds were threatening overhead, a drizzle had begun, and I stood in the centre of the arena no doubt looking very peculiar. I also wrote something on a stone (using another stone as pen), but I'm not going to tell you what it was. It's personal. On Wednesday afternoon I went on the excursion to Hay on Wye. Well, if you're really into mouldy musty old books, this is your Mecca. Everyone ran off to find their treasures; as for me, I found some ice cream and a pair of one-of-a-kind earrings in an artsy little shop. Or at least I think they're one-of-a-kind. Our coach driver was a roly-poly fellow from Brecon who made a lot of sheep jokes. All I know is, I've been to Wales many times, and I've yet to see any kind of dodgy activity with sheep. Mind you, I did notice a cow walking a bit funny.

Moving on from the profane to the sacred, the highlight of the week was definitely the Thursday evening appearance of the Cwmbach Male Choir, a cheeky bunch of Welshmen who performed for us and then as is customary each year, continued in the bar for another two hours till midnight, downing pints and singing everything from Elvis to weepy Irish ballads. When they left (threatening to kidnap both me and Teddy), a disco ensued, but it featured so much Abba that I was finally forced to seek refuge in the computer room to check messages and return pokes on Facebook. (I don't care what anyone says: I am NOT going to see "Mama Mia.")

Sadly, I couldn't stay forever in that lovely land and had to return to London right at the Friday evening rush hour. The tube quickly jolted me out of my Welsh tranquility with its delayed trains, trains that didn't stop where I needed to stop, and trains that just sat there because there was a backlog of trains. One can't help but wonder how Britain actually ran an empire when they can't even run a transportation system. But I'm not going to get all political here. I probably should stick to writing fiction. It's easier.

It had in it a short excerpt of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's poem about the knight. I was intrigued and searched for the poem online. Here's the entire work:

SIR GALAHAD

by

ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

My good blade carves the casques of men,
My tough lance thrusteth sure,
My strength is as the strength of ten,
Because my heart is pure.
The shattering trumpet shrilleth high,
The hard brands shiver on the steel,
The splinter'd spear-shafts crack and fly,
The horse and rider reel:
They reel, they roll in clanging lists,
And when the tide of combat stands,
Perfume and flowers fall in showers,
That lightly rain from ladies' hands.

How sweet are looks that ladies bend
On whom their favours fall!
For them I battle till the end,
To save from shame and thrall:
But all my heart is drawn above,
My knees are bow'd in crypt and shrine:
I never felt the kiss of love,
Nor maiden's hand in mine.
More bounteous aspects on me beam,
Me mightier transports move and thrill;
So keep I fair thro' faith and prayer
A virgin heart in work and will.

When down the stormy crescent goes,
A light before me swims,
Between dark stems the forest glows,
I hear a noise of hymns:
Then by some secret shrine I ride;
I hear a voice but none are there;
The stalls are void, the doors are wide,
The tapers burning fair.
Fair gleams the snowy altar-cloth,
The silver vessels sparkle clean,
The shrill bell rings, the censer swings,
And solemn chaunts resound between.

Sometime on lonely mountain-meres
I find a magic bark;
I leap on board: no helmsman steers:
I float till all is dark.
A gentle sound, an awful light!
Three angels bear the holy Grail:
With folded feet, in stoles of white,
On sleeping wings they sail.
Ah, blessed vision! blood of God!
My spirit beats her mortal bars,
As down dark tides the glory slides,
And star-like mingles with the stars.

When on my goodly charger borne
Thro' dreaming towns I go,
The cock crows ere the Christmas morn,
The streets are dumb with snow.
The tempest crackles on the leads,
And, ringing, springs from brand and mail;
But o'er the dark a glory spreads,
And gilds the driving hail.
I leave the plain, I climb the height;
No branchy thicket shelter yields;
But blessed forms in whistling storms
Fly o'er waste fens and windy fields.

A maiden knight--to me is given
Such hope, I know not fear;
I yearn to breathe the airs of heaven
That often meet me here.
I muse on joy that will not cease,
Pure spaces clothed in living beams,
Pure lilies of eternal peace,
Whose odours haunt my dreams;
And, stricken by an angel's hand,
This mortal armour that I wear,
This weight and size, this heart and eyes,
Are touch'd, are turn'd to finest air.

The clouds are broken in the sky,
And thro' the mountain-walls
A rolling organ-harmony
Swells up, and shakes and falls.
Then move the trees, the copses nod,
Wings flutter, voices hover clear:
"O just and faithful knight of God!
Ride on! the prize is near."
So pass I hostel, hall, and grange;
By bridge and ford, by park and pale,
All-arm'd I ride, whate'er betide,
Until I find the holy Grail.

Needless to say, this is now my personal code.

Today, a quote from Dorothy Sayers' Mind of the Maker, a book exploring the Trinitarian Creative God and humanity made in God's image:

"Here, you!" he will cry, "you have some trick, some pass-word, some magic formula that unlocks the puzzle of the universe. Apply it for us. Give us the solution to the problems of civilization."

This, though excusable, is scarcely fair, since the artist does not see life as a problem to be solved, but as a medium for creation [...] If, therefore, we are to deal with our "problems" in "a creative way," we must deal with them along the artist's lines: not expecting to "solve" them by a detective trick, but to "make something of them," even when they are, strictly speaking, insoluble.

Sayers argues that too often we look at life as a problem to be solved, rather than as a medium for creation.  Not only artists, but all creative types (which, if you ask me, means everyone) are called to create -- to make new things -- when faced with "problems."  An example she gives is the "problem" of death, mainly that we feel a "resentment and exasperation" in the face of death -- by the notion that anything in this world should be inevitable.  Our efforts are not directed to make something new out of the problem, but to "solve" the problem.  Of course, the problem of death is insoluble.  It can only be faced with creativity.

In closing today (I'll expound in coming days) I offer a creative "solution" to death -- a poet's take:

Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea,

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.

Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark;

For tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crossed the bar.

Crossing the Bar, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

Thus, in the sense of our own evolutionary history, the choice is made for us. We are predators, and not caretakers; bloody-mouthed shepherds and not sheep. Yet along with our jaws and our running pelvis and our throwing arm our minds also evolved and it is that that gives us the choice of whether to retain our view of ourselves as predators, or to subsume that old knowledge into a new identity.

Yet as we look at the world today, it is not hard to see that this new identity has not been taken up by many of our fellow predators. For predation continues – on the weak and the helpless, those that cannot fight back, who are the lesser predators themselves. And deep within us – or, at least, deep within me – there is a small voice that says: “Do they not deserve it?”

It’s easier to remember your evolutionary heritage when you are physically strong. Then any interaction with others is coloured by weakness – specifically, their weakness or lack thereof. It’s something that’s felt not only in real life communities, but in virtual ones as well, when each individual met is automatically put in one of two categories: they are weaker than me, or I am weaker than them.

It’s bragging to say it, but in most cases people I meet fall into the first category: men and women, physically and intellectually. And that is where my problem comes in. I can’t get away from the fact that I size people up like a predator – people or posts give out particular vibes, like an animal limping at the edge of a pack, like blood in the water.

It is the strong that survives, and the strong that should survive. Give me not that milquetoast “and the meek shall enter…” please. Why should they? I ask myself. And then that question gets damped down quite quickly, for the stronger part of me, the part that is not wholly predator, realises that a world run according to the will of the strong is more likely than most to end in bloodshed and destruction – and even in the service of a wider ideal, the improvement of the species, that is not a tactic that can be justified. Yet what is it that surmounts those millions of years of physical evolution? Is there a social evolution that moves alongside of it, a development of altruism that benefits the species, if not the individual? Some would argue that this knowledge comes from God, that atheists cannot explain the knowledge of good and evil in any other way – and yet, like the religious, atheists know that knowledge every moment of every day of their lives, for it exists within the body, “red in tooth and claw”.

If such as thing as God did exist, he would be the ultimate predator. You only need to read the Old Testament – among other religious texts – to realise that anyone who can and will slaughter entire cities of themselves can keep lesser predators in line when needed. But without that top predator, what keeps the rest of us from giving in to our own ability to predate?

There is the social contract, of course. If you don’t predate me then I won’t predate you. But if one were given the chance to predate, in an environment where that predation is free from risk or almost so, does that social contract hold? It doesn’t and neither does the religion – the fear that God will punish can and is often subsumed in the assumption that God will forgive, or that God will excuse or support a predation done for his sake.    

Yet that God should doesn’t necessarily mean that we should – and are we not the predators with whom we should have the most concern? It’s inescapable that, whether you believe in the death penalty or not, the world is just better off without certain individuals in it. Few would shed a tear if instigators of genocide were to be brought down by their own packs, and their blood spilled in place of others’. There is a certain temptation in power that the ability to successfully predate feeds upon, and that temptation is ongoing. If we cannot match the ultimate predator with his ultimate forgiveness, our own mortal lives still revolve around our ability to predate and our ability to judge the predation of others, and of ourselves. A certain amount of predation is necessary to live, after all. Perhaps that is the duty of the evolving Autopygmalion: to live with the temptation of our own nature without wallowing in it or hiding from it. To know the truth of our bodies and ourselves.

I don’t know the final result of this conflict between our two natures – the natures of our past. Where will they take us, in the future? Can there ever be a resolution, while we look at our hands and see the remnants of claws, while we can see the canines in each other’s smiles, and the soft pulse in the softer throats around us. Perhaps that is where we find the real knowledge of good and evil – in our ability to predate, and our reason to employ or withstand it.

The above words are not my own, but those of Robyn Hitchcock. They've been imprinted deep within the recesses of my mind ever since I heard what I consider his seminal masterpiece, Eye. At some point, I may dedicate an entire article to those words, that album and the I/eye metaphor, but for now I want to focus on another theme that's being pushed into the public mind as of late, tentacles:

As if the opening lyrics weren't illuminating enough, the following from "Clean Steve" (same album), is what inspired/guided me to undertake this present article:

and [he] pointed at the sun
'there's tentacles between our worlds,'
he said, 'so i believe'
i said, 'the man next door's best friend
was making videos with clean steve'

The first time I noticed the tentacle theme may be a meme was through the realm of synchromysticism. I had watched The Mist (per Dedroidify's recommendation), which features a dimensional rift and resulting tentacles in our world. [IMO: worth a view.] A few weeks later, I watched the new Futurama movie, The Beast with a Billion Backs, which is a about a dimensional rift and resulting tentacles. What did Clean Steve say about "tentacles between our worlds?"

Since then, Michael at Hidden Agendas has done an exhaustive investigation into the Futurama movie: SATURNday Synch Winks: Futurama Beastie (Part 1), Part 2 and gone on to write TENtacle Age: Quick Spots. On my end of the Atlanticle, I've been pondering where else these themes are being introduced. I thought of the dimension rift in Southland Tales, but that piece of neuro-linguistic programming (also present day social commentary) will require a review of its own. [Plus, I don't recall seeing any tentacles in it.]

One synch I'd like to add is from Futurama BBB to The Matrix is how in the former, the "octopus god" (Yivo, sounds like "evil") plugs into the back of people's necks. The latter movie also feature octopus-like machines (oddly enough, named Sentinels, which should make sense soon) and plenty of them.

I haven't seen Pirates of the Carribean: Dead Man's Chest (partly out of my growing aversion to the Disney Mind-Contol Machine, and partly out of not wanting to see anything promoting those Hollywood-glamourized thugs we call Pirates, aka Men of Fire, aka The Queen's Unofficial Navy). But, I will note the movie features a giant octopus (hence, tentacles) referred to as the Kraken (more on that later), a half-man half-octopus villain (more tentacles) and Keira Knightley.

Now that I've mentioned a "Queen" for a second time, I have to add that I found another tentacle reference in yet another Hitchcock song, "Victorian Squid" (which synchs with an odd Victorian painting I discovered on Boing-Boing):

There's old H.G. Wells, lying in bed
With his new housekeeper with, hot squid by their side
Glowing with pride, flushed with exhaustion

That does seem overtly sexual. Another tentacle that directed me and my attention closer to the octopus, was one from my forthcoming blog about condoms. [Soon, soon.] What do tentacles have to do with "rape" I wondered? The answer: plenty!

Well, apparently (new to me) there is a whole genre of tentacle porn out there in the hentai arena. How popular is it? I honestly don't know. Though, the number of Google results, would indicate significance. What I've gathered so far is that rape is a central theme and that the victims are often portrayed as preteen girls. A description from one such site catering to fans of the genre:

It’s a world of unstoppable lust and uncontrollable orgasms that’s waiting for you here, in the realm of tentacle monsters! Extremely cute and fragile looking hentai girls are taken by frightening tentacle monsters. Their snake-like limbs slide over babes’ young bodies and invade all of their orifices at a time bringing unbelievably intense sensations. Don’t miss out on the chance to see this tentacle hentai frenzy!

P.S. It was difficult enough to weed through and narrow down the option of images to include here. I have no intention of turning this site into Gosporn, but included a male image, just for balance. ;-)

The aforementioned synchs combined to serve as the proper mnemonic to help me recall a fascinating mythology from my youth; the multiverse created by Michael Moorcock (the Elric of Melnibone series). One facet of Moorecock's mythos I found particularly appealing, is that the Gods were not reduced to Good or Evil, but into camps of Law or Chaos. The Gods of Law used a single amber arrow as their symbol; the Lords of Chaos chose an eight arrowed insignia.

Above is (1) the Chaos Shield (a device that offers immunity from physical attacks from outer world beings), featuring the symbol, (2) a tattoo of same (an example of how memes are propagated, whether consciously or not) {*1}, and (3) a synch with the Hindu mythology, I believe related to the ancient Sanskirt Ramayan. [Anyone better versed on topic, please comment.]

The synch between the 8 rays of chaos and the 8 arms of the octopus should be self-evident. 8 X 8 = 64, which equals the number of squares on the chess board; the plane where the forces of light/dark (alternately, chaos/law) battle with their minds (¿for control of the mind?). Additional potential sychs from an on-topic excerpt from the Stormbringer volume (the final of six):

A return to the Isle of the Purple Towns, the allies last stronghold, and a pledge from Elric to bring about his fated purpose, or die in the attempt. "Sad Giants Shield. Thirteen times, the steps to the sad giant's lair; and the Chaos Shield lies there. Seven time seven are the elder trees. Twelve times twelve warriors he sees, but the Chaos Shield lies there."

Man's role, on his plane of existence, was to maintain a balance between the Gods, because there was no place for man in a world where either side established supremacy. Were the Chaos lords to win, man would dissolve into the ever-changing swirling chaos; there would be no permanent matter. Absolute Law offered no respite, as men of free will, ultimately, cannot co-exist with perfect order. [¿As would be the case in a/the New World Order?]

So, aside from the synchs already covered, what does the above have to do with tentacles? Well, in the final book, when Elric has to fulfill his destiny, he battles the Chaos Fleet of the Chaos Lord Pyaray. One of the portents signaling the end of the Melnibonean world is the ascent of the Chaos Fleet to the surface.

A passage from Deities & Demigods (Yes, I own a Dungeons & Dragons book. I know this may negatively affect my coupling probabilities, but has "blogging" really helped anyone get laid? Anyone?):

This terrible being is the Lord of the Ocean Abysses. He appears as a huge blood red octopus with a pulsing blue gem fixed atop his head. [Anyone familiar with Roy G. Biv can deduce that blue + red = purple.] Pyaray commands the Chaos fleet, a flotilla of sunken ships manned by undead sailors.

Those unfamiliar with Moorecock, may be familiar with the Call of Cthulhu mythos created by H.P. Lovecraft. The centerpiece of this mythology is an elder cephalopodish god, who lies asleep in the abyss, awaiting for the end times to come, so he can fulfill his role in bringing about the end of man. {*2}

Found a educational synchromystic piece from Live from the Logosphere entitled, Reptilian Brain, Cthulhu, Neptune, Andromeda and the Beast of Revelations. Regarding Cthulhu, he writes:

The story is about a beast that resides at the bottom of the ocean who settled the young earth to control it. Predating any living things in the universe and high priest of reptoid monsters called "the great old ones". Lovecraft seemed to dig into the deepest of unsettling poetic images in our unconscious minds ( the sea/abyss) and created the greatest horrible monster imaginable. So unimaginable it can only be described by statues made after seeing its shocking image.

Going to Deities & Demigods again (Argh! In case anyone missed it the first time. So, what is the numeric representation for slightly less than next to nil???):

In his house in R'lyeh Cthulhu waits dreaming. R'leyh is a great sunken city of non-Euclidian geometry hidden somewhere beneath the ocean. So bizarre is its construction that anyone entering the city (which occasionally rises above the waves) must make saving throws [at +4] against fear and insanity. Cthulhu lies in a huge stone structure sealed with the Elder Sign. If the seal is broken and the god released, everyone (and/or everything) in a radius of 100 miles must make a saving throw against death or go insane. This insanity lasts a number of months equal to the creature's intelligence.

Intelligence! So, the more intelligent one is, the more difficult it is for them to process the nebulous thoughts demanded by exposure to the complexities of what constitutes sanity and reality? Hence, would those pulled into the world of let's say, "tentacle porn," should they be of lower intelligence, simply appreciate it at its basest level (and have a "wank" or whatnot), while those damned to think, have to consider the degenerative effects on the human spirit? As for thought itself, I think I'm starting to understand Illuminatimatrix's assertion that "thoughts are always lies" (not for everyone). Note to self: watch more football! {*3}

From this base level, I think I can answer one of Hidden Agenda's questions regarding the preponderance of purple and pink in the new Futurama movie. Purple, represented by the tentacles, is the phallus in its rigid throbbing state, ready to inseminate. Pink is the color associated with Victoria's secret place. I could expand, but it is not my intent to turn this blog into Penthouse Letters. The two images below (after Frye's realization the tentacled one is coupling with him, combined with our exposure to tentacle porn), speak thousands of words I now don't have to:

I have few regrets in life, and over time, I find I have less and less. One had been that when I went to see Robyn Hitchcock play at some small theater, I (out of my own programming) brought a date along, so rather then going to quaint watering hole down the street afterwards, we went to her house (likely, led by one of my own tentacles). A friend (who I'd have joined) informed me that Robyn showed up, and sat at their table. Always rued missing the opportunity to speak with him one to one (or, eye to eye). Hmm, perhaps it is time I drop this regret too, cause as one of the fans on Glass Hotel (a Hitchcock tribute site) said: "Robyn's my favorite musician: I think he must be an Octopus in disguise."

Now, this is where things start to get really weird [so hard to say that with a straight face]. I found an article entitled Mandy Morbid: Cthulhu is my copilot on some adult video review site. Normally, I wouldn't sponsor/endorse such by linking to, but the article is unreal to such an extent, I fear that some may not believe me. That all said, now try and absorb this:

Tentacular Canadian Mandy Morbid is visited by the chief of The Old Ones in a new video on her site, shot like it's Abraham Zapruder's student film from Miskatonic University.

"It's more hot than gross," claims director Zak Sabbath, but you be the judge. The tentacles were upholstered with a series of black condoms and their issue, Sabbath said, "is a proprietary substance."

Morbid needn't feel ashamed about the attack. It's not like she was asking for it, even sleeping in the provocative way she was; when the tentacles come, there is nothing you can do.

Can a rock not be turned over without finding a Jew under it??? This 1% of the US population, dare I say, has a tentacular propensity to turn up everywhere. It's already beyond debate (didn't need the "Sabbath" reminder), that the American porno industry is completely dominated by Jews. Black robed judges stem from the Saturnalian Cult, that is now Judaism. But, what are the statistical odds of the one person to film the Kennedy assassination being Jewish? {*4}

Per the last link: "Zapruder, the reluctant [?] videographer, had caught the assassination on film, including the horrific shot in which the President's head explodes in a bloody mist of pink and gore." Pink vaginas for insemination. Our pink brains ripe for the insemination of propaganda?

The tentacles seem to pop up everywhere. As Earth-president Nixon synchs (Futurama BBB): "The tentacles are coming toward Earth and there's no stopping it. King Kong is too old to save us this time!"

Aside from the Nixon synch, the image on the right, in lieu of the pending 2008 Presidential [s]election, seems quite ominous. Perhaps Cthulhu wil raise the sceptre of his candid-a-sea in 2012? Or, will he elect instead to control the mind of Arnold Schwarzenegger (etymologically: the eagle power hatched from the black egg) and remain behind the scenes? As for the image on the left, any student (as in one who's actually studied history instead of had it implanted via indoctrination), the only arguable point could be which way the British connection runs.

Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA): Founded in 1976 by Jewish neocons Richard Perle & Eliot Abrams. Its mission is to promote US aid to Israel with military hardware. JINSA has its Jewish tentacles everywhere including the US Department of Defense.

JINSA has a formidable array of Washington power players on its rolls. Prior to Bush’s Presidency, JINSA’s Board of Advisers included Dick Cheney, Elliot Abrams (now the Deputy National Security Advisor for Global Democracy Strategy), John Bolton (now Under Secretary of State for Arms Control) and Douglas Feith, who was Bush’s third highest ranking executive in the Pentagon.

I now include the opening and closing stanzas from a poem by Lord Alfred Tennyson (another faithful servant of the Queen), which he chose to entitle "The Kraken." Perhaps, Tennyson is a Lord of Law? Read "Loxley Hall" for enlightenment on "the purple twilight" and his hopes for this order where "the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law." [¿I'll assume again, men of free will, won't fit in such?]

Below the thunders of the upper deep,
Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee

There hath he lain for ages, and will lie
Battening upon huge sea-worms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by man and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.

I found the poem on the-emperor.org, which addresses the surfacing of the meme. The site is definitely worth a read and a pretty good place for all things Cluthlu. So, now we have also synched with Clash of the Titans, Knightly personas, the KK sygil, British Zionism, two cocks, infinite phalli, the MM sygil, possibly The Titanic (¿more souls for Pyaray's/Cthulhu's army?) and what else? The synchromystic cephalopod does indeed have many tentacles. I can't help but note that Danny Casolaro was suicided (i.e., murdered) while researching and writing about The Octopus.

The tentacle Meme goes back some time, and apparently [see image], leads to subconscious repetition. Robyn Hitchcock's biggest influence Syd Barrett, had a song name "Octopus," and was commemorated with Octopus: The Best of Syd Barrett. Radio / television programming is pushing it further and further into our minds. Hoping to turn fiction into reality? Even the Beatles got in on the act with with the innocuous sounding "Octopus Garden:"

I'd like to be, under the sea, in an octopus' garden in the shade
He'd let us in, knows where we've been, in his octopus' garden, in the shade.

I'd ask my friends to come and see, an octopus' garden with me
We would be warm, below the storm, in our little hideaway beneath the waves

We would sing and dance around, because we know we can't be found
We would shout and swim about. The coral that lies beneath the waves
Oh what joy for every girl and boy, knowing they're happy and they're safe

Sounds like a wonderful place to be, doesn't it? But, seeing that the Queen's invasion troops, the Beatles, were sent here to expand the market for her drug distribution empire, and as per blog I am writing in synch, expand H.G. Well's idea of "free love." I'll remain leery of how wonderful a place Cthulhu's garden might be. My programming leans more towards Hitchcock (from "Devil's Radio"):

Evil. Its tentacles are bland. It's like a weevil. It burrows through the land. And everybody smiles. Everybody smiles
We was listening. We was listening to the Devil's radio. And it went na na na na na na.

I had contemplated the effects of music on an unprotected psyche, in another "crazy" blog. Devil's Radio? I like it! What else did I find? More proof that the tentacle rape/sex theme, was not lacking in Futurama BBB. The tentacle god, at the end, breaks up with [literally] everyone and chooses Colleen as his mate. She was the character who could not be satisfied by one man, keeping many live-in lovers.

Note the V so blatant in almost every shot of Colleen through the movie, pointing to her Vulva/Vagina. Her name, could be broken down into the Saturnian double EL sygil, leaving Con (which could imply a scam or tie back to the Cohn/Cohen serpent line I've heard Michael Tsarion discuss). One could go so far as to break down evil by removing the feminine (vagina) and the masculine (the phallic i), leaving us with Jordan Maxwell's true "Lord of the Rings," Saturn (i.e., el). But, enough!

Looking into Cthulhu's realm, sometimes felt as if dancing on the brink of sanity. The Tentacle Rape pornography is one of those things, which sometimes, is best left undiscovered. [Hence, my apologies to those who I've now introduced.] Demonstrating for one of my incredulous friends, we went online to see just how much of it was out there. The answer: a lot. One "game" we found allowed you to be the Octopus and "rape" your victim. I took us a while to figure out why we weren't "scoring" so well; the more you made the child cry, the more points you accumulated! Proceed at your own mental peril. Even Mr. Hitchcock warned of Clean Steve: "They don't come any dirtier than him."

Oddly, one of the more terrifying/fantastic creatures that my mind remembers from Dungeons & Dragons is the Mind Flayer. These creatures were humanoids with an octopus-like head, that attacked the mind before the body. Turning to the Monster Manual, we find this excerpt:

They are greatly evil and consider the bulk of humanity (and its kin) as cattle [¿goyim?] to feed upon. Its more feared attack mode, however, is the mind blast of psionic power. Mind flayers have the following psionic abilities: Willpower Drain, Domination, Telepathy, ESP, Proto Dimension, Dimension Walk.

These monsters speak only their own arcane language and several other weird tongues — purportedly those of terrible races of things which dwell in regions of the subterranean world far deeper than mankind has ever ventured. It is also rumored that these monsters have a city somewhere deep beneath the earth. {*5}

Its skin color is a nauseous mauve, its tentacles being a purplish black. A mind flayer's eyes are dead white, no pupil being evident.

Since that manual came out, they've been expanded on and grouped into a class known as Illithids. Another source cited them as having legions of unaware mind-controlled followers on this Earth. These abilities synch with a book I found rather skeptical upon first reading: Subterranean Worlds Inside Earth. The image below does a fairly good job depicting the "mind-flaying" process:

In keeping with the rape theme, anyone's who's been subjected to the experience, will tell you the mental impact is far more damaging than the physical. Yet, ever day, we (humanity) en masse willingly subject ourselves to the mind-rape from a vicious mind flayer we dismiss as "the media." Be it music, movies, television programming or news "coverage" disguised as "reporting," the rape is of a nontraumatic gradual nature (disguised as entertainment), but the net effects are the same. We are being shaped, from the person we could be, to the person our predator wishes us to become. We need our own version of the Chaos Shield. [Maybe Hidden Agendas was onto something with that "symbol shield" phrase!]

As my new logo implies (note the shield too), I had to undertake this adventure, in order to understand this new wizardry. While we may choose to stay out of Cthulhu's realm, the media is intent on bringing it to us. {*6} I've made my journey and I think I made my saving throw. I'll be fine. I think. I am.

---

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

---

*1: I find the tattoo "explosion" disturbing considering that most people who opt for tattoos, select a symbol they've never properly researched. As an older biker lamented to me once: "Back then, tattoos were a sign of nonconformity and rebellion. Now, everyone's getting them. It's conformity. It's fuckin fashion!" I'll resist the now requisite "tramp stamp" at 16/18 phenomenon, and devote some space/time to the mindless inking of peace, dove and love symbols [hopefully, soon]. [LB]

*2: As I previously expressed, be ware of anyone with a double initial preceding their name. So, we have H.P. Lovecraft. [¿Loves the craft?] Before this is over, H.G. Wells will get another mention. Lastly, some of the imagery conjures up H.R. Geiger's artwork. [LB]

*3: A mind-fuck worth considering: the day the population was convinced/programmed that intelligence was something quantifiable and could be measured with a number (IQ). Honestly, as if such a thing could be calculated. The joke is that it's kind of like a [on-topic] penis measurement or annual salary. Something you know, but tend to not talk about openly, for fear someone nearby might top you. Most Mensa members I've met, excel at regurgitation, but are sorely lacking in the critical thinking department. [LB]

*4: While looking into Miskatonic University, I somehow came across a page talking about a game called "JFK Reloaded," which was released on the 41st anniversary (synchs with 14/41 from last blog), and the point was to assassinate JFK. I tried to find out who was responsible for said game, but other than "Traffic Games, a division of Traffic Software, in Scotland," I found absolutely nothing. What kind of software company doesn't have a website? Try it yourself. As the Venture Brothers might say, "We have a mystery!" Worth a mention: Mary Moorman was standing opposite Zapruder, when she captured her shot of the assassination of another MM's infamous lover. [LB]

*5: Since we're synching back to Hollow Earth, will note that H.G. Well's book on the topic is being remade into another soon to be released disinformation vehicle. Also saw that the "old boy from San Anselmo" is still at it [disinformation], franchising an Indiana Jones and the Hollow Earth book (written by a Max McCoy). Speaking of mind-fucks / predictive-programming, the recent Indiana Jones and Crystal Skulls was a sickening display of all phrases contained within this footnote. [LB]

*6: This article was sprouting a new tentacle as soon as I got done chopping one off. Ending it was a challenge. But, I do have to include that tonight as I was writing this out on the back patio, a friend called me in: "You've got to see this." There was a documentary on about this little girl born in India, with 4 legs and 4 arms. Yes, really.

And today (post-publication), I see the above synchronystic image posted on the Alex Jones Infowars site. How "insane!" [¿Thoth = Truth?] See Cthulhu Chronicle #14: The Scroll of Thoth. Hitchcock (the line following opening stanzas from Clean Steve): "You could have knocked him [¡me!] down with a feather!" Finally, an "interesting" find/synch called The Death of Journalism and the Rise of Octopus Porn. [LB]

True love is not something that can be taken, it has to be given freely. When not done truly or freely it is but an imitation of what could be, contrary to the metaphoric saying, "to steal someone's heart away". What is sad is some spend their entire lives never achieving this goal, later believing their pursuit to have been a waste of time. In this, I totally dis-agree. Reminding me of the saying by Alfred Lord Tennyson, " 'tis better to have loved and lost - then to never have loved at all."  Strangely some find this to be questionable.

Many have and will confuse romance with lust. Lust being the inbred sexual desire assuring procreation - a trait every animal posses. Where romance is the endearing thought and action displayed in a controlled manor producing a pleasurable response. The ability to differentiate romance from mere lust is what makes this form of love special to many, and considered by cynics as a naive concept. Declaring the idea of romance without lust - an impossibility. Professing that visual and mental attraction, with the help of pheromones as the only key to this equation of mutual desire.

Romance is an entity which bares many faces. It can be ones best friend and another's worst enemy.  Ahab's white whale or someone's pot of gold at the end of their rainbow. What history has proven, most will try to acquire it, and many have died for or because of it.

There's one thing I have found to be true, seeking romance can be as wonderful as obtaining it. Then again - that's just one man's opinion. 

Once I began publishing poetry and some criticism in the 90s, I had hopes of finding the sort of bohemian literary community I had known a decade earlier when I had worked and rather starved in the Dinkytown neighborhood of Minneapolis for a number of years in my early thirties.  I first turned to a scattered, loosely-organized community of poets, the New Formalists, developing an extensive correspondence with several of them for a year or two.  To a man they were courteous and often amusing and I will always value their friendship, letters and advice, but bohemian they certainly were not.  As a movement they liked to characterize themselves as outsiders, as existing apart from academia, but most of the ones I met were in fact professors.  They thought of themselves as mavericks,  as literary gadflys,  and so they were - but in terms of their circumstances, the ones I knew seemed very comfortably set up and thoroughly bourgeois. 

I also looked seriously at several writing programs, hoping for a remnant of the old bohemian spirit, which was like looking in a brickyard for butterflies, but I was unemployed at the time and the prospect of paying my way through a quick program by teaching, and being able to teach afterwards, was just too attractive.  I applied to and was accepted by two programs, one at Washington University in St Louis, and the other at Arkansas in Fayetteville.  I was well-impressed with the several writers I met in both places, but their highly-structured programs put me off.  I knew I could never write in such circumstances, or talk about my work and aesthetics in the ways that I would be expected to.  Imposing such a highly organized structure on the creative process seemed contrived and forced.

I also tried joining several online communities of writers and poets when the internet first got underway in the early 90s, but this arrangement also seemed contrived.  Not even writers can communicate by words alone.  Actual friendship was impossible -- there was no shared hardship -– mostly what came through was impatience and rudeness and offended feelings.  After several centuries of the evolution and refinement of coffee-house communities, mankind had taken a giant step backward with the online discussion list.  Of all the places where I had hoped to find a living writers' community, this was the least successful.

Bohemia on the Mississippi: early visits

I might have been less dissatisfied had I not previously lived within an actual bohemia for several years.  I had begun visiting Dinkytown, on the edge of the Univ of Minnesota in Minneapolis, in the late sixties or early seventies when my brother Richard began his graduate studies at the university.  Dinkytown formed half of the bohemian center of the twin cities, with its sister neighborhood located just on the other side of the Mississippi.  To walk from one neighborhood to the other meant crossing the  high bridge over the Mississippi where John Berryman had taken his last leap.  My memories of Dinkytown in those times seem almost golden at this distance.  My brother and I had just entered our twenties and although we had already chosen very different roads, with he plunging ever deeper into professional responsibility (Piaget-based research into infant cognition) and me having already spent some years as an itinerant knockabout (divorced, jobless & broke), we both still shared some sense of the wide world opening with promise before us.  In so many ways I must have alarmed and appalled him, but he never let on, never passed judgement.  Instead he always just opened his home to me (it being 1/3 of a basement, walled-off, mattress on the floor, chest of drawers, desk, stereo & albums – lovely), often slipped me a small stash to use as I liked, once procured tickets to a David Bowie concert, always provided as much food and alcohol as I might want, and even money if I needed it.  It was all simply his idea of hospitality.  I would never again have such a friend.  Years later when the world would fall in on me and I would find myself completely alone, he would be at my side, without my ever asking for him.  There  would be at least two occasions when I would not have survived had he not shown up unbidden, from half a continent away, at just the right moment.

My visits to my brother were not exciting by anyone’s standards, but I wasn’t seeking excitement or distraction.  Dinkytown was full of bookstores, new and used, and as Richard pursued his research in a campus office, I would browse their shelves to my heart’s content.  For some years I had been reading, along with countless others of my generation, the full range of Beat literature, Basho and the other haiku poets, Zen and Tibetan Buddhism, -- Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman, Henry Miller, Hesse, and Mann, and listening endlessly to Bob Dylan.  The several small bookstores in Dinkytown in the very early seventies catered perfectly to this taste, and offered far more besides, so that I was always exploring.

Interlude: marriage, wilderness exile, wanderings, the asylum, among the Muses

In the fall of 1971 I was married briefly to a nineteen-year-old Irish beauty, Vickie O'Dell, but was divorced within a year.  She left me with three lifelong gifts: a love for Wuthering Heights, the music of Joni Mitchell and a love for cats.   (Many years later I learned that, as Victoria Dickenson, she had become a notable folk and rock singer in the northern Illinios/ Chicago circuit during the late 70s, early 80s).    

Shattered at losing her. I took to the open road and spent the whole of 1973 as a sort of dharma bum in the wilderness of coastal Washington where I lived in a lean-to, wandered along the coast and deep into the forest, ate a lot of peyote, read Han Shan, Basho, Jeffers, Snyder and Kesey, worked in cedar mills and as a cedarbolt cutter in the woods (see Early days II: along a wild stretch of the Calawah).    

After a fall, winter and spring of this primeval idyll, I again hit the road for several months of penniless vagabonding through Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Nevada and Oregon with a young cat for company.

Returning to northern Illinois and in the mood for something completely different, I took a job as a night nurse on a locked ward for the criminally insane for a year and a half, found a charming garden apartment on the Rock River, and spent my days sleeping and reading Dante and Shakespeare, the Romantic and Pre-Raphaelite poets, Baudelaire, Tennyson, Swinburne and Yeats, and traded in Dylan for Debussy.  On my nights off I would stroll for four and five hours at a time through any of several neighborhood cemeteries shadowed by another young cat, smoking hashish and writing one howlingly bad poem after another in labored rhyme and meter.

Return to Bohemia

I also resumed visits to my brother who was still living in his basement room on the edge of Dinkytown.  These were the times I valued above all others, particularly so now because of two new feminist friends of my brother: Christine, a poet and graduate student in Shakespearian studies, and Kristie, a graduate student in psychology at Stanford.  They were both very gentle and indulgent about my bad poems, reading Keats with me for hours, while trying unobtrusively to steer me in the direction of Eliot, but were rather less indulgent regarding my views towards women, which they considered excessively romantic.  In spite of this, there was a flare-up of mutual attraction between Kristie and myself, and for several months I was in a state of complete inebriation, making the six-hour drive to Minneapolis as often as I could manage, skipping work and classes to do so.  But our lives were taking us in very different directions and there was probably never any question but that we would have to break it off.  Yet even now, after more than three decades, I cannot think of her without a pang of regret.

Interlude: literary studies, marriage to a poet, difficult times

Now skip ahead six or seven years.  After several years of irregular study at Rockford College, majoring in English literature with a strong minor in Western philosophy, I had dropped out of college, married Virginia DeCourcy, a brilliant, brooding poet, journalist, epistimologist and classicist (see submerged in the waters of Lethe), and after several troubled, difficult years in Illinois, followed by a desperate year in Colorado, we arrived in Minneapolis in an ailing Datsun with $500, several hundred books and not a job prospect between us. These were to be years of deepening darkness ending in tragedy, and I am not yet ready to recount them.  From the first day there was a cloud over our life there.

Return to Bohemia: more difficult times, life among the nocturnals

Richard had by this time married and moved to Pittsburgh, and Kristie was long gone.  Nevertheless I look back on those years with a certain fierce affection, particularly for the several years I spent as a clerk in one of the oldest used-bookstores in Dinkytown, working six or seven days a week, 11 am to 11 pm.

It was not the job itself for which I harbor affection, but for the nocturnal world it made me a part of. Those evenings were filled the regular appearance of a whole cast of writers, musicians, street people and incorrigible characters, though it is the poets I most remember.  Two in particular come to mind, as they were the first poets I ever met who, like me, worked in traditional forms.  As far as I know they have both passed into obscurity.  I don’t remember the name of either.

The first was a small, slight, hunched man who appeared to be in his sixties, though his circumstances were so hard that he may have been younger than he looked.  He was very much of the genteel, high-culture school of Wilbur and Hecht, and his knowledge of prosody was so much extensive than my own that I never mentioned to him that I was a poet at all.  He was known to all the older established poets in Minneapolis and was well respected.  I was working as a clerk in a bookstore at the time, and he would come in most nights (we were open until midnight) after he got off his shift as a dishwasher.  He rode an old-fashioned 1950s-vintage bicycle, and was always under-dressed for the weather.  He had a cough, and seemed cold and frail.  I had heard that he had been living in a tiny rented room for as long as anyone could remember.  On every visit to the bookstore he would always purchase a book, but never more than one, and never for more than a quarter or fifty cents.  This restricted him pretty much to used copies of the old paperback Laurel series of pocketbook poets.  Most of the time he would conclude each such purchase with some lines from that particular poet which he had by memory.  The extent of poetry he could recite at will was something wonderful, and in that particular neighborhood, it was an ability which was widely admired.  (Note: if anyone can supply the name of this poet or provide any of his poems, I would be grateful.  The poet and editor James Naiden (see below) was for several years compiling material towards a biography of him, but I don't know if anything ever came of it  If you have information about the identity of this poet, or the Naiden biography of him, please contact bj omanson at skipper@labyrinth.net).

The other poet was in his late twenties or early thirties, I would guess.  He was very different than the older poet, being full of nervous, aggesive energy and he was very brash and outspoken.  When I was in a certain mood I found him intolerable, but usually he was worth enduring, simply for his originality.  Like the older poet, he rode a bicycle, but it was an expensive racing machine.  He worked as a janitor by night, and read and wrote for most of each day.  I have no idea if he had any formal education.  All he wrote were blank-verse plays, in a dense but vigorous Elizabethan style, and what he wrote was remarkably strong.  He wrote every day, a hundred lines or more, but what I saw of his work was always highly crafted.  He would hang around the bookstore at odd hours, and when a literary-minded customer would come in, especially if he happened to be a professor from the university, my friend would thrust some pages under his nose and demand his opinion.  He was never quite so obnoxious that I had to eject him from the premises, and even at first glance his writing was impressive, so I just sat back at such times and watched the encounter with interest and amusement.
~~~ As he was my own age, more or less, and we were both in similar economic straits with no professional prospects, I showed him some of my poems.  He was only mildly impressed, and criticized my lack of prosodic rigor, but he approved my adherence to antiquated forms and since, like me, he had received nothing from editors and other poets over the years but admonitions to write in free verse, he accepted me as a fellow-sufferer.  He was a vagabond, just travelling through, as he said.  I don’t remember where he had come from prior to stopping for several months in Minneapolis, but the time came when he no longer dropped in at the bookstore and I never heard from him again.  Somewhere in the cavernous recesses of my old house, among hundreds of boxes, I have a typed copy of one of his plays, but I haven’t seen it in years.

 Regularly James Naiden, a stout, hardy-looking gentleman in corduroy coat and carrying a rugged leather satchel, would stop by to sell a handful of literary titles.  They were always very good titles from the store's point of view, and always in new condition.  When I asked about them once, he said they were review copies.  I learned later that he reviewed books for the Minneapolis Star and for his own literary journal, The North Stone Review.  As it chanced we both favored a tiny cafe at the end of a covered alley about a block and a half from the bookstore.  It was situated between Gray's Drug, above which Dylan had quartered in the late '50s, and the longstanding Varsity Theatre, which had shown many a worthy 'art film' over the years.  The cafe was owned by two young sisters who were tolerant toward writers and did not pressure them to move along if they wished to sit and write for an hour or three, taking up space and spending little.  JN always sat in his preferred corner, back to the wall, his satchel, books and papers spread out beside him.  Often I joined him at his table, but more sat off by myself, or with Virginia.  In the midafternoon the cafe was often nearly empty and as it was so small, we could converse easily back and forth without raising our voices.

James had a very brusque exterior, did not suffer fools at all and was accustomed to dealing with writers' inflated and easily-bruised egos, for which he had no patience.  I would guess that he was heartily disliked in many quarters.  Of his past I could glean only that he had been a smoke-jumper for a time in the Canadian wilderness, and also that he had been a speechwriter for Eugene McCarthy.  James was the first true man-of-letters that I had met, but which I mean one who supported himself solely by his pen, by writing and editing, without resorting either to teaching or to hackwork.  He appeared to live modestly, drove a beat-up old station wagon, and seemed always to wear the same worn coat.

As he had evidently been in the Minneapolis literary scene for many years, James seemed to have stories about every writer in Minnesota, large or small, living or dead.  He was unimpressed by reputation or celebrity and with a single phrase or word could cut through a mountain of hype.  I recall acerbic comments or stories about Robert Bly on several occasions, though Bly was a poet he published from time to time.

While I cannot recall any specific stories about Bly, I do remember very well a story he told me about John Berryman:  Once, many years before, Berryman stopped by Naiden's apartment when James happened to be in the shower.  As the door was unlocked, Berryman let himself in, which he had done on past occasions.  As he was waiting on the couch, thumbing through a book, the front door flew open and in stomped the landlord, loudly shouting out for JN and demanding two months back rent.  Berryman rose up from the couch and blustered back, shouting, How much does he owe?  -- A hundred bucks.  Berryman pulled out two fifty-dollar bills, shoved the landlord out the door and threw the bills after him.  It all took place while James was in the shower.  By the time he emerged the landlord was gone and the rent paid up.  James promised he would pay Berryman back as soon as he could, but Berryman refused to take his money.   That's the gist of the story as I remember it, though after all these years I may have gotten a detail or two wrong.

Naiden could be a tough character.  Once he returned to his parked car to find a would-be thief with his arm though a broken window.  The thief hadn't noticed James' German shepherd in the back seat, which now had his jaws locked on the thief's forearm.  James refused to order the dog to release the thief until the police arrived, though the thief was in some pain.  He was wearing a coat, JN explained.  He wasn't bleeding.  If he didn't like his arm in my dog's jaws, he shouldn't have put it through my window in the first place.

Another side of James's character is revealed by the following story.  During one especially bitter winter, he somehow formed a friendship with a particular homeless man.  I seem to remember that he was a Vietnam vet, and part Indian, but I'm not sure about it.  In any case, James was concerned about his sleeping in the open on nights when the thermometer was falling well below zero.  He wanted to get the man indoors for the night, so invited him up into his apartment.  He was concerned that his friend not feel that we was the recipient of charity, so James asked him up for a chess game, saying he didn't have nearly as many opportunities to play as he wished.  His friend accepted and, while they played, James was casually able to offer him some food.  He was unsuccessful, however, in persuading him to spend the night.  But, as he told me later, James was at least able to get his friend out of the cold for a while and get some food into him.   After that, whenever it was particularly cold, James would set out to find his friend and invite him up for another game of chess, and I would hear about it the following day.  Then one afternoon when I found James in the cafe drinking coffee, he told me his friend had been found frozen to death in an alley.  I can't remember now how it was that James came to befriend him, but I think he simply used to see him regularly in his neighborhood and so spoke to him from time to time.

During the years that we knew him, James Naiden was unfailingly kind to Virginia and me.  Virginia had a great affection for him, and was continually amused by him.   He was a well-established poet, writer and editor, and we were unknown, but those facts never entered into our friendship.  At one point James decided he would have Virginia do some editorial work for his review, but for some reason nothing came of it, though they met to discuss it on at least one occasion.  Most of what we learned about Naiden's literary position in the Twin Cities we gleaned from chance remarks over a period of years.  We didn't keep up with literary news or gossip, and James didn't speak of his own work except in passing.  At that time he had not yet published a book of his own poems, though I believe he was instrumental in publishing the books of several other poets.  I had found a few of his poems in journals.  I remember them as dense and difficult.  Not something to warm to easily, but compelling in their complexity and unexpectedness.  They were more to Virgnia's taste than mine.  To me they seemed thoroughly modernist, and Modernism did not interest me much in those days.

Not infrequently James would warmly recommend some contemporary poet or other to me.  Some were well-known, others weren't.  I was often skeptical and unconvinced, but he would take the time to explain their worth to me.  He criticized my method of reading books of poetry, of thumbing through and reading individual poems at random.  He said I owed it to the poet to read them through in order, just as they were laid out in the book, and to read each one with complete attention.

The graveyard shift in the book store was a perfect place for meeting wierd, highly-literate characters.  One  dashing young gent, Emmett Smith, in sweptback hair and sunglasses, used to drive up in his 50s-vintage pickup from somewhere miles to the south where he raised goats on his farm.  I never inquired about his education, but he spoke in elaborate perfectly-formed sentences worthy of Dickens or Trollope, though his figures of speech were closer to Donne in their reliance on startling juxtapositions.  He just spun this language out off the top of his head in a kind of nonstop drunken reel:  long oratorial periods declaimed in a loud barroom voice with irreproachable grammar, the whole effect being rendered all the more surreal by his subject-matter, which was goat husbandry and long meditations on the Bedouin and TE Lawrence, punctuated by Persian proverbs in melodious Arabic, for he had sometime earlier in his life spent years in the middle east with the Peace Corps and the experience had crazed him in some deep essential way.

There were many other literate characters around Dinkytown and they all seemed to pass through the bookstore and to pause for conversation.  The owner of the store, James Cummings, had over 100,000 titles, but there was scarcely a "popular" title among them.  The store's descriptor was "used and rare scholarly books" and that is all he carried.  It wasn't the sort of bookstore you ducked into for five minutes on your way to the airport, looking for the latest John Grisham.  The usual patron of the bookstore spent a half hour or more, just browsing, and frequently commenting -- to whomever might be in earshot -- about whatever author happened to come to hand.  I had studied literature and philosophy intensively for years in college, but I got a wholly different humanistic education by working nights in that bookstore and listening for hours to the rambling near-soliloquies of patrons (most of whom were not professors).  In some cases they had known the authors personally and had stories about them, or had read them so thoroughly that they might as well have known them.

The nights I spent in that bookstore soon numbered in the hundreds, and by  the end had exceeded a thousand.  Literary  conversations begun in the store might be continued on the street, in the cafes or in bars, and I grew to believe that such a high level of literacy was a common state of affairs.  I forgot what a relatively rare and fragile a thing it was.

A few years later the critic and poet Dana Gioia would write a worthwhile little essay entitled  "Towards a New Bohemia" in which, amid many other ideas, he suggests that the "old urban bohemia" had died out after the sixties due to a rise in real estate prices.  This was certainly an accurate description of Minneapolis in the mid-1980s, though I would argue that bohemia around the university was far from dead.  Virginia and I were only just barely subsisting, and after the first year made the questionable decision to move well out into the country where we could rent a place for a fraction of what it cost in the city and heat with firewood.  We continued to work in Dinkytown for several more years.  Many of the writers and artists we knew around Dinkytown were struggling through those years, and some, such as ourselves, eventually vanished.  

At the time of his essay, which was some years ago, Dana Gioia could still find hope in the proliferation of small independent bookstores across the country which were hosting poetry readings and forming literary communities around themselves, but in the intervening years, with the rise of online commerce, most such small bookstores have gone under.   In any case, single bookstores can't sustain a community by themselves.  In Dinkytown in the early 80s, there were still a good many poor literate individuals living marginal lives: poets, painters and street musicians, working as janitors, laborers and dishwashers.  Rather than a circle of individuals centered around a bookstore, it was a community living in a neighborhood.   It is the disappearance of such communities that Gioia acknowledges in his essay.  Unfortunately none of the succeeding "bohemias" have been actual communities, but only ghosts of the real thing.

The poets I knew in Dinkytown in the early 80s were unconnected to academia or the marketplace.  They lived close to the street, to the crumbling edge.  The price of their independence was often poverty and obscurity.  The "starving bohemian artist" may be a dated cliche, but I have known a number of flesh and blood individuals who fit the description, and most of them, perhaps a vanishing remnant, still lived around Dinkytown in the 1980s.

the worst of times, the best of times

It is easy to romanticise bohemia, though less so if you are living it.  It can be a terrible life.   It wears you down, erodes your health and personality, and is absolute hell on relationships, but it leaves you free to read and write exactly what you wish, without obligation to anyone or anything, and that is not a small matter.   

Those early years as one of the nameless nocturnal writers of Dinkytown left an indelible mark on my self-image as a writer, on my understanding of what a writer is and does.  To write has nothing to do with theory or intention or profession.  It has nothing to do with the classroom.  It has everything to do with hunger, the hunger for beauty, the hunger for love, the hunger for quelling the gnawing within.

Since knowing such poets -- none of whom were professors, and few of whom lived in comfortable or secure circumstances -- I have found it all but impossible to feel any essential kinship with academic poets -- and academic poets seem to be the only poets left.   Looking back on my years in bohemia -- the hardships of which I cannot yet bring myself to enumerate, but which cost us our marriage, and Virginia her sanity and ultimately her life -- it was nonetheless the only place where I knew poets who, despite terrible cost and with no advantage to themselves, were poets because they could be nothing else.

My companion through many of these years, in my twenties and thirties, was another poet, Virginia DeCourcy, a woman with sensibilities even darker than my own. On our first solitary walk together, to an old graveyard in the small hours of the night, we came to an open, newly-dug grave, and without a word she climbed down into it and lay silently at the bottom, disappearing into its shadow. Since childhood she had written fiction and formal philosophy and newspaper editorials, but when she met me she began writing poetry, almost with a vengeance. It was like nothing I had ever read.

GRAVETIME

I.

The death wings of a bird
reflect a star,
voyaging to the other side of the world

I resent the journey,
the lessening of light,
feeling it in my heart
as if it were the night

the unhopeful winter
surges toward spring
on feathered gallows:
sea steps change ~~
and beyond the strand,
I saw the small body of spring
slain on the hilltop,
the bride of many whirling ravens.

II.

Gravediggers stand near,
gaunt as oaks in winter ~~

I feel my fingers starved
as newly buried bone,
clutching black silk:
within the coffin lies a woman,
her gold-willed hair
crushed beneath a skullcap ~~
a many-jewelled and horned headdress
the gravedigger gave her:
he gave me nothing,
as befitting those who
sleep before gravetime ~~
where winter is the eternal
and unlovely season.

III.

There must have been a reason,
a beginning to winter ~~
the void of birds
makes it difficult to remember:

as if the fragile veins and wings
of what must have been my being ~~
snapt shut suddenly
as the shell of a sea-thing,
or the cold metal lock
of a secretive box ~~
(to deny the light
and touch the frost).

IV.

My mother was a seamstress,
she sewed me shut:
my mother was a seamstress,
her needle pierced my heart:

we never spoke,
as one would speak,
beyond the curtained window ~~
yet waking in the night,
I heard her sigh in the other room,
and thought her breasts
were wakeful, as in another world
she was a bowl of lilies
in a sphere of hyacinth and yew ~~
she was a bowl of lilies,
my father plucked her roots,

letting the frost in.

V.

Like unwilling birds of prey
that light on the horned ledges
in a grotto of the heart,
the sea rushes in:
purifying the carrion
of stone cages within ~~

in winter awakening,
my body feels unsure ~~
smelling of death somehow
in its meagre warmth:
the world intones
a fraility I cannot grasp ~~
I start, and try to hear
the words pronounced:

there would be an ending to this ~~
as waiting, a train filled
with birds finally comes:
the rustle of their winged discontent
fills the terminal like women
crying in a prism of sand and ice.

VI.

Carved walls of intricate thought,
trees of solace grow berries
fastidious as shrunken autumn’s aftermath:

seeds black and round ~~
hurtful spheres containing
the mirror of another light:
worlds stand side by side,
doors passing from each,
domes of torn being ~~

as if I lived in the heat
of a distant star,
and knew it ~~
pressing it into my body:

yet here, within my breasts,
the frost remains ~~
dark birds light upon my heart,
and I have waited for the rest,
have known it ~~
as an unlovely visitor,
the forbidden guest ~~
that stole the sweetest fruit,
burying it ~~ hard and bitter
in ripeness it decays:

(they whispered she was digging
her own grave), filling it
with black seeds:

thoughts like hawks
that glean the countryside:
or on a solitary branch,
I wait in cormorant attitude ~~

VII.

While beyond,
the sea is chanting,
its hollows and caves
an echoing cathedral ~~
a massive organ voice
with silver pipes:
it imitates the motion of the earth,
and never dies ~~

I hunt close to the shore,
not wandering out over
the great black rocks:

I do not know how
I will find death
in so immense a thing:
my heart has long been carrion
to the birds within ~~
I sound a bell in the dark,
hoping it will find me out.

She died young, as she always said she would, at the age of thirty-six, over twenty years ago. I have never been able to write directly of her death, but I do write of it, as in the following poem about Elizabeth Siddall or, more specifically, about one of Rossetti's portraits of her in the Art Institute, which Virginia and I first saw together on an autumn day over thirty years ago -- when I vowed secretly to devote my life to poetry :

AN ELIXIR OF POPPIES

I.

A cloud of remnant flames that sway
on slender stalks above a mound
of green entangled frond on frond
whose petals droop and drop away

to lie in tatters on the grass ~
while still the heavy-headed blooms
imbue the air with drowsy fumes
that linger long before they pass.

The poppies rise, unfurl and swell
and spread their petals to the sun
till every hue is all undone
and every husk a hollow shell.

II.

Rossetti to his Lizzie gave
elixir of the poppy’s bloom,
displacing all her pain with gloom
and bedding her within a grave,

but ere the lid was hammered tight
he lay his sonnets at her cheek
as though her muted lips might speak
his lyrics to the airless night.

At length a season passed away ~
the grass upon her grave stood tall ~
Rossetti could not sleep at all
for dreaming of her where she lay.

He quelled his sorrow and regret
with little sips of laudenum ~
elixir of the poppy’s bloom
that wrapt and held him in its net

and drew him into visions such
as only thralls to beauty see,
that verge upon insanity
and touch what only spirits touch ~

then dead at last to all but art,
as though possessed, he drew and drew,
his every line a root that grew
around and through her buried heart.

III.

The light that pierced her deathly sleep
and fell upon her dreamless eyes
was not of angels come t