Our Past Is Far More Radical Than We Are Allowed to Know

On "The Famous Flower of Serving Men" and the Folk Revival That Birthed the '60s Counterculture and Called Back the Great Goddess

(Photographs referenced below are here and here.)

YES I HAVE BEEN GONE a long time, and yes there are more changes in Dispatches forthcoming, changes I will announce in another week or so, as soon as I have thought them to completion.

Meanwhile here at last with my apology for the unforeseen delay is the essay I promised Kate King in gratitude for her unusually knowledgeable You Tube comment about "The Famous Flower of Serving Men" -- an ancient but timeless epic of familial dysfunction, murder, Goddess-magic and revenge told by a very old and eerie traditional Scots ballad¹ hauntingly performed in the early 1970s by the incomparable Martin Carthy.

There is eeriness here as well. When I applauded Ms. King last June I was at the nadir of my disablement  by an excruciatingly painful leg and knee injury. In keeping with the theocratic sadism that is ever more obviously the core of U.S. medical policy, I was (of course) denied the prescription pain-killers that would have made my injuries bearable. In any nation under the Abrahamic god, such injuries are reckoned divine punishment for sin, and the associated suffering is minimized only enough to reinforce its Big Lie of caring.

When I recovered sufficiently to begin writing the promised addendum, I assumed the task would take no more than a couple of hours, and I welcomed how its need for concentration refocused my mind from the injury's by-then-diminished but nevertheless still intrusive throbbing. But then, much to my surprise, the writing became not the intellectually sociable fulfillment of a promise as I had intended but rather a relentless compulsion that would not let me stop until I had hammered out close to 30,000 words. It was my first encounter with the impassioned Zen of writing; it was an effective distraction from physical pain; it was at times as if I were possessed by the Muse, an intensity I had often experienced while working in photography but unlike anything I had ever before encountered at a keyboard, and it revoked with finality the profound self-doubt that prompted my oft-repeated statement that "photography is my passion while writing for me is never more than intellectual struggle."

I thus owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Martin Carthy and Katie King and several others I will name as this story unfolds. 

But now I had to edit my often stream-of-consciousness prose and somehow condense its text back to reasonable size. Hence I divided what follows into what I hope are intellectually palatable sections; hence too I apologize for the occasional repetitiveness thus rendered unavoidable and also for the typos and dropped articles I am bound to have overlooked. I probably be making minor  corrections and revisions in this piece for as long as it and I remain alive. Which -- at least for the foreseeable future -- defines it as a work-in-progress. 

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THOSE OF US who are already familiar with  traditional British and European folk balladry --  especially those of us aware of the hypothesized origins of its form and much of its content in prehistoric liturgies of the Cosmic Mother (and the pivotal role that content seems to have played in the birth and growth of the 20th Century Counterculture) -- may of course scroll down directly to "Now About 'Famous Flower' and Its Patriarchy-Subverting Content" and start reading there. Despite  its 1972 recording date,  "Famous Flower"  exemplifies the traditional music popularized by the folk revival a decade and a half earlier -- music that based on its apparent role in shaping the Counterculture seems to possess an uncanny power to change both spiritual and political consciousness.

That's why I suspect even those of us who were part of the Counterculture and are thus presumably intimate with at least some of the eye-opening truths buried within its maliciously censored history will find the this entire essay affirming, supportive and thought provoking. These sections preceding its "Now About 'Famous Flower'" conclusion will provide vital perspective for those of us who weren't there, and they refresh the perspectives of  those of us who were. In either case they're essential background if we are to appreciate how the folk renaissance of the 1950s engendered the chronically overlooked (and no doubt deliberately ignored)  aesthetic solidarity that paradoxically lay beneath the Counterculture's obvious ideological fragmentation.

 
Fifty-nine years ago, seemingly by happenstance, I learned some of the oldest traditional European folk  music -- melodies and words powerful enough to repeatedly evoke...

(To read the rest, go here.)