Six Essays: Gratitude for the Restoration of My Eyesight, Pagan Music as an Antidote to the Politics of Despair

 

Emergence Nr. 17 (Click on image to view it full size.) Photograph by Loren Bliss copyrights 1971, 1976, 1985, 2016.

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THOSE WHO WERE appalled by my impending blindness will be delighted to learn an eleventh-hour charity paid Group Health Cooperative the obscenely prohibitive co-payments it charges for the surgery required to save my eyesight. (Group Health's fees, in no way exceptional, exemplify what obtains when health care is a privilege of wealth rather than a human right, and the care-giving organization's primary purpose is therefore to put oodles of boodle in executive pockets rather than treat the sick and heal the wounded.) That said, if there are any of you I have failed to thank for your supportive and/or prayerful good thoughts, please accept this expression of my gratitude as well as my apology for the oversight.

But I would be derelict in my journalistic duty were I to ignore this opportunity to note the likelihood there are also amongst OAN's readers a few who were cheering my blindness and praying it would silence me forever. Since Occupy Tacoma, http://occupytacoma.org/71-year-old-tacoma-veteran-on-why-she-got-involved-with-the-occupy-movement/ interference by the secret police will not allow me to email OAN's Internet address to anyone unless I first disguise it as a TinyURL. And let us not forget my 2010 ouster from Facebook in retaliation for suggesting the so-called “Great Recession” was deliberately engineered to usher in accelerated austerity and thereby speed the imposition of overt fascism.

Thus, in addition to thanking my benefactors, I give my most emphatic middle-finger salute to the vassals and functionaries of the One Percent – the spooks and police agents and soldiers and politicians and bureaucrats and cops and maybe even a welfare official or two – all of them fanatical defenders of capitalism and sworn enemies of the Working Class, each of them a-boil with Heinrich Himmler hatefulness perpetually inflamed by Christofascist or JesuNazi cults whose Yeshua is “der Führer Who Art in Heaven” and whose sadistic intent toward the 99 Percent is to brutalize us into slave-camp submission no matter our race or gender or how we define ourselves politically or spiritually or sexually – and then, when we are too old or crippled or mentally mangled to be exploitable for profit, to cast us off like worn-out machinery and exterminate us by “austerity” and whatever other methodologies of genocide can be hidden beneath cloaks of euphemisms, disinformation and Big Lies. Let us also in this naming of enemies note all those 99 Percenters who yet stupidly believe capitalism will someday let them “hit it big” – that is, to get so rich they can brazenly fuck over everybody else – and now either sit at home opiated by Mainstream Media and awaiting the Rapture or have already joined Moron Nation's roving bands of misogynists and homophobes, banging their Bibles and brandishing their biblical bellicosity to terrify women and lesbian/gay/bisexual/transsexual folk and anyone else who might dare rediscover the holiness of sensuality and everything else stolen from us by patriarchy in the name of “God's divine plan for salvation.”

To all such adversaries I turn the other cheek – that is, the other cheek of my arse, that they may glimpse the defiance implicit in a Full Moon.

Plus in my case there were probably also less fingerworthy, less cheekworthy detractors, a very few hateful kinfolk breathing sighs of malicious relief at the apparent end to my periodic disclosures of familial dysfunction. There's even a faint possibility the personal-adversary list includes the first woman I truly loved, she who at age 17 captured my heart by teaching me Plato's Republic. Though our relationship lasted three years, in her eyes I was never more than a stepladder for escaping the slums. Despite her sociological origins, she was boldly articulate and beautiful and memorably shameless in bed, but she thought my talents inferior and regarded journalism as an insufficiently glorious choice in comparison to the worlds of literature, fine art and academia. As soon as I was bailed out of jail, she demanded to know if I was “getting involved with Communists and stuff.” I answered truthfully – “probably,” I said – and without a moment's hesitation she replied, “then I'm leaving.”

This last event was long long ago and far far away on geography I have not visited since 1969 and will probably never trod again, but I remember it whenever I review my life as I am doing now in rescued-from-blindness introspection, and I am always surprised to discover her rejection still hurts, no doubt because she was my first lover in this lifetime whose intellect I truly respected, and she was therefore too the first woman whose claim to see me as attractive seemed believable and even trustworthy, never mind the all-pervasive sense of physical and psychological ugliness that is an irremediable part of my psyche. The long-ago blow of her rejection was thus many times multiplied by how it brought back to dagger-sharp focus my own negative sense of self. Such is the oddly enduring nature of love-related trauma, lingering even when the love is subsequently proven to have been wholly unrequited and the illusion of its sharedness thus discredited as nothing more than manipulation bolstered by one's own penchant for fantasy and wishful thinking. How happy I am to have escaped that relationship's ultimate ensnarement. How quickly introspection see-saws me from joy to sadness and back again, mixed reflections viewed – even with restored vision – behind mutually contradictory tears.

(Forgive me if I bathe in bathos or lapse into lugubriousness [the latter noun, by its congested-sinus resonance, perhaps my favorite example of onomatopoeia]. Or don't forgive me. As long as you keep on reading, I really don't care.) 

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THE MOST IMPORTANT point to take away from my brush with blindness is how the obscenity of defining health care as a privilege of wealth combines with the capitalist greed of chief executive officers to eliminate all meaningful distinction between non-profit and for-profit care-providers. That is the real significance of the prohibitive price – nearly $161 per minute for approximately five out-patient minutes of laser surgery – that without the intervention of charity would have damned me to permanent sightlessness.

But it is also important to note how the ability to pay that fee (or any comparable sum) has been put forever beyond my own financial reach by the senior-subsidy cuts imposed by Washington state Democrats.  Charity saved my eyesight (and thus saved me) this time, but what happens if there is another pay-or-die medical crisis? The truth is that I, like so many others, am now imprisoned in a de facto death-cell, locked behind invisible bars and restrained by invisible chains until the Reaper – himself obviously a Ruling Class functionary – calls my name.

These circumstances exemplify the murderous economics of capitalism and of the now unabashedly capitalist (and therefore overtly fascist) economics of the USian Imperial Homeland and afflict untold numbers of us whether old or young also exemplify the diabolical cunning of capitalist governance. We satisfy the partial-truth needs of the imperial propagandists because we (officially) have health insurance. But we also slake the infinite greed of the insurance barons who fatten their assets collecting premiums for insurance deliberately structured to be unusable. Here, of course, is the genocidal purpose behind prohibitively priced co-pays. If we purchase the care that might save our lives, we are left with insufficient money for food or shelter. Ultimately our only choice is how we will die: will it be from untreated illness, or from malnutrition and homelessness or some combination of all three. Or perhaps we will yield to ultimate despair and do an Ernest Hemingway or a Sylvia Plath or a Diane Arbus or exit via some other premature means. Such are the methods by which the capitalists exterminate those of us deemed “surplus workers” – those of us considered no longer exploitable for profit.

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IRONICALLY IT IS the Bible, the world's most viciously patriarchal (and therefore definitively capitalist) doctrinal sourcebook, that contains what is probably the most anti-capitalist proverb ever penned: “Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them” (Matthew 7:15-10, King James Bible).

Thus we witness the toxic fulsomeness of capitalism in all its genocidal savagery and ecocidal malignance. We see how capitalism transforms the (literally) deadly sin of infinite greed and elevates it to the capitalists' ultimate virtue – the one ethos most vital for capitalist function. We recognize how capitalism thereby rejects every humanitarian principle our species has ever evolved. We acknowledge how it replaces all these age-old principles with its might-makes-right (and-mighty-profit-makes-mighty-right) credo of serial-killer moral imbecility.

(“Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.”)

And now at last perhaps we are being forced to admit capitalism threatens the survival of not just our own species but literally of all life as we know it. Which makes capitalism the closest real-world approximation of the Abrahamic concept of Absolute Evil our species has yet spawned.

(“Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.”)

Yet far too many of us remain suicidally blind to what capitalism is doing to us all and how its own depredations point to socialism as our species' only possible means of survival.

Susan Sontag wrote of illness as metaphor, and though I have always understood the notion intellectually, I did not comprehend it emotionally until I understood how the blitzkrieg of looming blindness and my own financial defenselessness was a perfect metaphor for the plight of the entire 99 Percent. Capitalism has smashed all our mechanisms of resistance and now, as if to use us for compost in its next crop of atrocities, it is plowing us all under.

(“Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.”)

As for me, I probably would have been white-cane sightless by the end of next month, just in time for my 76th birthday. Between 3 January, when I first noticed my sight diminishing into milky haze, and 27 January, the date of the surgery, I had already gone nearly blind in my right eye, and the sight in my left eye was in jeopardy. But the laser surgery not only restored my distance vision, returning it to the Fountain-of-Youth clarity achieved by the original cataract surgery;  it also improved my close-up vision, minimizing my need for reading glasses – an affect my ophthalmologist says is commonplace but unpredictable and is therefore not mentioned to patients beforehand lest they by disappointed should it not materialize.
But what of all the other women, children and men who are not so fortunate as I have been? Reflect not just on the skyrocketing numbers of homeless people;  think also of the original Bloody Sunday and Triangle Shirtwaist and Bhopal and Katrina and Bangladesh.  How many more must die before the ravages of the capitalists are ended?

(“Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.”)

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WHY HAD MY vision been saved? What was Fate demanding of me? I had never been granted a favor of such magnitude, nothing even remotely so pivotal, and my dialectical-materialist skepticism was instantly at war with my Pagan intuition. The former dismisses my good fortune as random chance; the latter defines it as a genuine miracle, an event that requires some new vow of gratitude (“thank you Goddess; hence I shall devote the rest of my life to [whatever cause]”), this combined with some ritual of thanksgiving, by rainy-season necessity a private indoor rite though at least accompanied by incense and suitable music, the search for which brought a Muse-poet named S.J.Tucker into this text – she who  dares respond to the challenge Tim Buckley voiced 49 years ago: “if you tell me of all the pain you've had, I'll never smile again.” But that – articulating the pain of her gender and her generation – is only part of her repertoire; she also she grants blessings aplenty of comic relief, and not infrequently the purity of healing laughter as well. Her website tells me S. J. stands for Susan Jane, that her friends call her “Sooj” – and I find myself hoping she might read this and at least recognize me as a distant ally, a elder comrade, though I cannot imagine we would ever meet.

But first before I continue praising Tucker as a True Bard – surely as true as any since the first Taliesin (he who sang mysteriously of “the rulers of Britain, abounding in fleets” perhaps 2400 years before Trafalgar) – there is the matter of that other vision I mentioned in this essay's title: a dark vision, my own troubled vision of our present potential and our probable future (scroll down the comment thread for my two contributions), a haunting mind's-eye vision that in my film-camera past and as shown in the image above, sometimes took form, invariably with a faint warning prelude of alchemical sibilance, on DuPont Varilure in 1:3 Dektol beneath amber-filtered lights, and sometimes too as passages of spontaneous prose seemingly borne of some outside source (“where the fuck did this come from; I can't believe I wrote it”), as if the Muse (whose objective reality my dialectic materialist agnosticism forever forces me to question), were nevertheless once again whispering her double reassurance – that she forgives me even my gravest doubts and that – as Robert Graves put it – she offers “nothing promised that is not performed.”

As I confessed in today's title, I vacillate between faint hope for our species' post-apocalyptic survival and absolute despair at the runaway nuclear train of our self-inflicted extinction. The former is ephemeral at best; the latter, which too often seems impossible to refute, is authenticated by my too-intimate knowledge of the United States as the de facto Fourth Reich, which is (A), hell-bent on conquering the world; (B), ever-more-relentlessly subjugating all its peoples beneath the profiteering tyranny of the Imperial One Percent, whilst (C), being endlessly cheered on by Moron Nation mobs chanting “USA! USA! USA!” at every war crime or homeland atrocity.
Trouble is, most USians – all of our brains at least partially clogged with capitalist propaganda – are carefully conditioned to never dare look at ourselves in any sort of psychologically revealing mirror. Thus we are loathe to acknowledge Moron Nation's Zieg Heil reality is but few footfalls distant from that of Nazi Germany. And we are genuinely terrified to admit we are the most ignorant people in the industrial world – that we reside in the only realm on this planet to embrace Orwell's satiric “Ignorance Is Strength” as biblical writ – and that we have done so with such prideful malevolence it has become the one inviolable shibboleth of our national (un)consciousness.  As Vladimir Ilyich Lenin asked in 1902, “What Is to Be Done?”

Then as now, and precisely as Lenin stated, “'(f)reedom' is a grand word, but under the banner of freedom for industry the most predatory wars were waged, under the banner of freedom of labor, the working people were robbed.” But what is so radically different – and what reduces the ideological quarrels of Lenin's era to apparent meaninglessness – is the unprecedented extent to which the Working Class of today, the 99 Percent, has been robbed not only of the tools of resistance and the knowledge of how to use them, but all too often also gutted of the sense of selfhood and grievance from which effective resistance arises. In Vladimir Ilyich's time, whether in the imperial United States or the Russian Empire, the instruments of oppression were obvious: the bullets and bayonets of the soldiers, the knouts and truncheons of the Cossacks and the cops, the prison and the gallows, the lynchings and pogroms tolerated by (and often encouraged by) the authorities. The means of resistance were therefore also obvious. Now, despite our rising anger at what the capitalists are doing to us, it is for the most part suppressed by modern variants of pānem et circēnsēs, the bread-and-circus opiates by which the Roman Empire controlled its own oppressed masses. The USian forms of these distractions are many. They include the Colosseum-equivalents of violent films and professional sports; the pornographic antics of celebrities; other forms of vacuous entertainment including what passes for “news”; the zomboid numbing induced by alcohol and drugs whether legal or otherwise; and most of all the omnipresent opiate of Abrahamic fundamentalism, its socioeconomically malicious prosperity gospel having now become so malignantly popular its taint is found even in avowedly secular New Age and Pagan conceptualizations. (Yet what else could be expected here in the most moronically Christian-fundamentalist nation in the industrial world?) Hence what a fellow Occupy activist said to me in 2011: “the 99 Percent is terribly broken.” What she dared not add was the probability most of us are broken beyond repair.

What then – if anything – can be done?

In Lenin's day it was customary for revolutionary parties to offer political-education programs – and by all the available evidence, the global Working Class was eager – literally trudge-barefoot-through-the-blizzard eager –  to receive it. But in the USian homeland of today – where the prison-like atmosphere of government schools guarantees the educational process is disliked (if not despised outright) even by those of us who theoretically know better – the mere thought of returning to a classroom or even picking up a book or pamphlet is often prohibitively repugnant. This sort of aversive conditioning – part of a far greater scheme of making certain our every contact with government is unpleasant if not disastrous – is perhaps the most cunning way capitalism defends itself against socialism. Socialism is after all a form of government – the most democratic form our species has yet evolved – and as government it requires organization and personnel. But if government itself is despised, its form becomes irrelevant – and that is precisely the adverse legacy fostered by the inherent malevolence of capitalist governance. The same methodology is even more evident in the state and federal welfare bureaucracies, their obvious purpose not to help us weather the chronic instability of capitalism but rather to deny us the very aid we need for survival – thereby ensuring we are reduced to perpetual victimhood. This not only serves the capitalists by providing a vast supply of unemployed workers whose desperation for work shrinks wages to hitherto-unimaginable minimums; it also intensifies the hatred and suspicion that fuels anti-government sentiment ranging from the Anarchists to the Tea Party.  It is thus the key to understanding how so many Working Class folk are seduced into the economic suicide of supporting Right Wing candidates and parties: their anger and sense of betrayal by (capitalist) government leaves them no apparent alternative. In this context, education thus acquires a triple cloak of repugnance, firstly because of its prison pedagogy, secondly as a microcosm of capitalist governance, lastly as the traditional target of the venomous anti-intellectualism that has always been the prime effluent of Abrahamic fundamentalism.  Here is the root cause of why modern efforts to educate the USian Working Class invariably fail. Here too is the ultimate source of my own political despair, for it is one of the absolute truths of history that without education, revolution is not just impossible, it is also unthinkable.

But there remains one medium of communication (and therefore of education) that transcends all the negative associations the USian Ruling Class has maliciously affixed to education. This is music which – since its stimuli is as sensual as it is intellectual – is perfect for the dissemination of revolutionary or heretical ideas. Indeed it has already served as literatures of rebellion for populations as far removed from one another in time and geography as medieval peasants, antebellum slaves, modern USian minorities and indigenous peoples of the post-colonial Third World. Hence the relevance of the work by S.J. Tucker and her colleagues transcends its personal significance to me and becomes political in the broadest possible sense.

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A FEW DAYS after the surgery that saved my sight I was researching more of Faun's inspiring output and thinking what a tragedy it was my late friend and spiritual sister Helen Farias had not lived long enough to witness this example of the joyously revolutionary aesthetic and spiritual flowering that is taking place within – and in open defiance of – the electronic concentration camp the USian Empire is making of our entire planet.

Helen was the first person to read and comment on the earliest (1971) draft of “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer,” and it was Helen who paid the work what is probably the most significant compliment I will ever receive as a writer – “you have given me the vocabulary to describe what I have always known to be true but never had the words to express.” Eighteen years later she founded the women's spirituality journal Beltane Papers, worked herself to exhaustion advancing the scholarship that was legitimizing the resurrection of the Goddess and died of cancer on the autumnal equinox of 1994. By then, not only had “Dancer” been destroyed by fire, but the loss – 24 years of research notes, photography and text financed by my paychecks from print journalism and therefore accomplished mostly on weekends and during occasional periods of freelancing – had flung me into a clinical depression of such depth and duration it forced me onto welfare which, as all but the newest OAN readers know, branded me with the forever-inescapable odium of having been officially disabled. My formerly award-winning reportorial, photographic and editorial skills were thus rendered effectively worthless by the characteristic USian hatefulness toward anyone who is known to have been afflicted by mental illness. Even when such a condition is definitively temporary, as mine surely was – even though I was never institutionalized – such a diagnosis once officially rendered interacts with Moron Nation bigotry to produce more than enough venom to destroy one's career prospects forever. But despite the associated depths of despair I have never been able to abandon “Dancer's” core hypothesis: that no matter whether the Goddess is symbol or objective reality, it is only through her resurrection we will evolve – or perhaps restore – the sort of consciousness from which we can articulate and organize the politics we need to save our species from extinction. I was thinking about these matters, surfing the Internet and wishing I were necromancer enough to call back Helen to revel in the triumphant implications of Faun and the wild acclaim of its ever-growing audiences when the magic carpet of YouTube somehow bore me into S.J. Tucker's “realm of the sky.”  The accompanying video, one of the most evocatively powerful such pieces I have seen, is itself well worth watching. 

Though I am nearly 76 years old, my journalistic curiosity remains as intense as it was in my youth, and whenever I find myself happenstanced onto new ground, I am thus compelled to explore it. I was vaguely familiar with “Witches Rune,”  one of Tucker's earlier works, a verse from which I quoted to open Part 5 of “Dancer Resurrected,” an OAN essay  that is entirely too long and desperately needful of competent editing but after revision is sure to be a central part of a book I have tentatively titled “Encounters: a Modern Odyssey.” But I when I was researching and writing “Resurrected,” I was working with my usual intensity of focus and neglected to pursue Tucker's repertoire any further – obviously my loss, and an error for which I hereby apologize should she ever read these words. Now though I paid attention and explored her work and was soon rewarded with her variant of “Tam Lin,” a traditional ballad most likely borne of a remnant of what long long long ago in the age of the Goddess had been a lay of invocatory magick. It is a song for Hallowe'en, which in Celtic Paganism is the night the year dies, but the pre-patriarchal ancientness of its origins is suggested by its portrayal of the spirit of the year as female rather than male. Hence the lyrics seem to embody two liturgical purposes, first to mark the annual departure of the goddess of the Old Year, who in response to more recent expressions of Christian love [i.e. witch-burnings] has been disguised as the Queen of Faery; next to welcome the goddess of the New Year disguised as the shameless Janet pregnant by her chosen consort the Once and Future King, her pregnancy the metaphor for a rich harvest the following spring and summer. The earlier variants of “Tam Lin,” all of them collected during the past three centuries, each hinted at the underlying sexual connections, but Tucker's reconstruction implicitly recognizes the sacramental elements that define pagan sexuality. These she spells out in poetic detail (how else might Janet have gotten her “dirty knees”?), which elevates Tucker's “Tam Lin” to the most ritualistically appropriate variant I have yet encountered. It is also – very appropriately, I think – notably reminiscent of what traditional British balladry sounded like after a century in Appalachia (the archetypal example of which is the transformation of “burgundy wine” to “burglar's wine” in the murder-ballad “Willow Garden”). Tucker's revisions make me wonder – and yearn to find out – what she might do with two other surviving lays of sexual magick, “Jack Orion”  and “Willie's Lady,”  a more traditionally Scots variant of which is here. 

But for me the most intriguing element of Tucker's music is her merger of myth and mirth with the politics of resistance, a bonding exemplified by “Baba Yaga,” which repeats in story-form the humanitarian message the patriarchal lore-thieves stole from the Goddess many millennia ago: “as you do unto the also least of these, you likewise do unto me.” It also suggests song as the medium by which pagan steadfastness might yet, to the ultimate benefit of us all, be comfortably mated with Marxist/Leninist/Maoist determination. Which conjures up an image of a Peoples Court, the Red Banner adorning the wall behind the bench, the three judges briefly conferencing in whispers, then the senior judge ordering the defendant to stand for sentencing. “It is the finding of this court,” she says, “that you as a capitalist are guilty of innumerable crimes against the People. Accordingly, you are turned over to Baba Yaga, that she may eat you for her lunch.” Which recalls a graffito that began appearing on Pacific Northwest walls maybe 30 years ago: “Eat the Rich,” though nowhere did I see a corollary “Baba Yaga Lives.”

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WHEN WE EXAMINE the conceptual barriers that now seem to divide Marxists and Goddess-centered pagans into mutually exclusive camps, we see they are mostly derivatives of the same campaigns of Big Lies and disinformation that perpetuate Moron Nation itself.

For example, the notorious malevolence of Abrahamic religion toward Nature, women, minorities whether ethnic or sexual, sexuality itself, any forms of governance that might genuinely empower the 99 Percent, science and ultimately dialectic materialism, has left Marxists instinctively skeptical not just of Judaism, Christianity and Islam but of all religions and even of individual expressions of spirituality. Those who know little or nothing of Goddess-centered paganism thus find it difficult to accept it is in every way imaginable the diametrical opposite of the Abrahamic cults. Unlike Abrahamic religion, which curses the entire realm of physical being and dismisses life as an ordeal engineered by a divine sadist to determine one's fitness for an unlikely paradise of prayers, hymns and the rape of virgins, Goddess-centered paganism is grounded on the implicitly revolutionary premise life is a quest for knowledge and experience that includes every possible input. It thus emphatically embraces the entire spectrum of positive human experience, sensuality and sexuality included. It views us all as siblings in the family of Nature, regards femaleness as Nature's most complete living metaphor, embraces all the tools dialectic materialism has given us for knowing Nature and ourselves, restores to sexuality the ecstasy and freedom from guilt implicit in its original manifest sacredness and looks upon the Goddess as an earthly symbol of a truly humanitarian society. The goal of building a human society based on the core principle of Communism – from each according to ability, to each according to need – is thus already implicit in the concept of Earth as Mother. And the principle of giving voice to those who have been forcibly silenced by the ravages of capitalism – that is, of developing leadership cadres from those who have experienced the most acute forms of oppression firsthand – surely echos in the lyrics of “Baba Yaga”:

She said “I will be here when you're ready.
My fire will still burn when yours starts to go.”
She said “I have always been here,
I with my fearless feet in the snow”
She said “I'll be here just to watch you grow.”

Beyond “Baba Yaga” I found another Tucker song, “Rootless,” that in more ways than I can comfortably disclose seems to speak directly to me:

don't give up ride out be bold 
build the fire bright and strong
speak your truth and sing your song

Somehow, perhaps because despite my English surname my ancestry is 90-something percent Celt (and that seasoned with a trace of Mohawk), these lines remind me of what the Celtic warrior Calgacus said of an earlier plague of empire-builders: ubi sōlitūdinem faciunt pācem appellant – “they make a desert and they call it peace.” I think of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Fukushima, of Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon, but then I realize how Tacitus' story of the Brittani and their fight against Roman subjugation tells us our struggle against capitalism is but the newest form of the struggle against patriarchy and is therefore an old, old war indeed – an epic conflict in which our comrades include not just those of the past three centuries, but a roll-call of heroines and heroes dating at least to the Achaean sack of Knossos 3600 years ago. All at once this music of which I have been writing – Faun's and Tucker's – makes me ashamed of my despair. The lesson here is that revolution takes many forms, some not immediately discernible. But I cannot any longer doubt revolution is on its way. As Marshall McLuhan noted (though if memory serves, it was Carl Jung who said it first), art is often prophecy,  and Tucker's art, like that of Faun, is clearly preparation for a time in which capitalism no longer rules. If indeed there is some cosmic purpose for which my eyesight has been saved, surely it is helping foster that blessed future.

LB/6-13 February 2016

-30-

More Reflections on Faun and Revolutionary Music

(The following is a expansion of my recent comments about Faun,  the outspokenly Pagan German musical troupe that has become part of Europe's post-Christian avant-garde Left and one of its primary cultural magnets. Like today's commentary, this too was birthed by my correspondence with the writer Cate Montana, who has become one of my closest friends.)

***

I WAS ZENNING OUT, recovering from the monthly madness of the senior-citizen newsletter I edit and produce, when I decided to play some more of Faun's work including “Blaue Stunde,” a piece to which I had not really listened before.

Then playing it while actually paying attention,  I discovered several of those poetically indicative chills in the musical accompaniment and instantly became enough curious about the song to run down a translation of its lyrics. 

What I discovered was rather mind-blowing. From the lyrics of “Blaue Stunde” I would say whomever wrote them actually encountered the Goddess, much as I did in the water meadow at Wickersham on 15 August 1970...

I had walked alone and lonely into the Innis Creek water meadow, a vast unkempt field beyond the buildings and gardens of the Wickersham, Washington commune where I was then staying, and now I stood amidst Nature's shadowy harbingers of Autumn: blown thistles, bright clumps of pearly everlasting, iridescent cobwebs bejeweled with dew. The communards were meeting in their main building but were ensnared in psychodrama intensified by ideological disputes, and I had left in bitterness and disgust. Now in search of inner peace I sprawled on the ground and gazed at the zenith-high improbably brilliant full moon as if it were some mandala of last resort. Then to my astonishment there was a kind of psychic jolt, intangible yet seismic in its intensity, as if some unseen door had burst open, and all in the same breathtaking instant the moon spiraled into a rainbow that expanded to fill the entire sky, contracted to a vortex of spinning colors, plunged tornado-like to earth and shaped a magnificently ageless woman pale and translucent as mist yet undeniably real. She was majestically naked but loosely wrapped in the lunar blonde infinity of her own hair; she smiled, reached out her hands, touched me, perhaps even kissed my brow, then like some impossibly magical dancer swirled her endless mane into rainbow hues that swept her aloft, dissolving herself back into revolving bands of color that expanded once more from horizon to horizon and shrank into the moon again – a millisecond's vision, a mere glimpse so brief and so ephemeral I could scarcely believe I had seen it and yet so vivid it could not be denied.  But now as if nothing at all had occurred there was only the commonplace moon again, the midnight sky and its diamond constellations, the fragrant crush of wild chamomile beneath my head, the vast nocturnal stillness of Pacific Northwest woods so unlike the firefly-bright insect-rowdiness of the fields and forests in which I'd spent the summers of my boyhood and adolescence.  When the night's chill finally urged me to my feet, I remember there were faint tendrils of fog rising from the creek, and for a moment, just once, it seemed I heard the clear cold water chuckle.

….much as Apuleius (124-170 CE) encountered her at sea (for which see the account beginning on page 70 of The White Goddess [Farrar, Straus and Giroux edition: 1982]), much as Graves himself obviously encountered her but – lest he be declared insane – never dared acknowledge it save in his poetry: “Her sea-blue eyes were wild/ But nothing promised that is not performed.”

Whether such encounters are objectively real or merely an especially intricate manifestation of some carefully unacknowledged insanity spawned by our species' overwhelming terror of mortality – and I must confess I myself alternate between precisely those antitheticals – one does not write such poetically accurate description from belief or theory alone: again my own statement that one cannot be truly Pagan unless one has spent enough time in the back country to have seen the shadows dance. Indeed  as I wrote the preceding sentence it came to me – and with that bright undeniable certainty of an old-time flash-bulb going off – here is the entire story of my life: seeing the shadows dance sufficient times to learn not to flinch, to embrace the experience as a demonstration of love, and now that I am too old and worn down by age and poverty to retreat again to the wilderness and once more hide there from the Lords of Chaos who have usurped that which rightfully belongs to Our Lady, to at last bear witness to what half the time I know to be unequivocally true. Quoth Graves: “none greater in the universe than the Triple Goddess.”

Which, by the way, is why I bristle at the Xtians even when, as now, they occasionally acknowledge the relevance of ritual dance and thereby (unwittingly) underscore the irremediable contradiction between the dialectically inertial momentum of matter that is the essence of life versus the infinite hatred of sensuality and indeed of the entire physical realm that is implicit in the definitively misogynistic, definitively ecocidal dogma at the core of Judaism, Christianity and Islam alike.

But perhaps I should not bristle quite so much. Ritual dance has been methodically denied the followers of the downpresser Abrahamic creeds since the Deuteronomic (patriarchal) "reforms" of approximately 600 BCE,  and the fact dance is now (begrudgingly) admitted to some Xtian ritual cannot be anything other than yet another example of how, when the Goddess is barred from the front door, she inevitably creeps in the back door – a truism that is of course dismissed as “an old wives' tale” – never mind that is precisely what she did via the folk-music renaissance of the 1950s – in which context note the noun "ballad" as a  derivative of the same root (Latin as I remember) that gave us "ballet." In other words, a ballad was once by definition  the musical and poetic accompaniment of a dance, a ritual dance, the  connection remaining so powerful that in some of the original folk-renaissance renderings of balladry (such as Martin Carthy's variant of “Willie's Lady”), the music is so vivid my mind's eye can see the turns of dance – the very sort of vision so emphatically underscored by Faun, obviously knowingly as I believe they are all classically trained musicians and being European are of course classically educated as well.

(How ironic one of our main hopes for a sustainable world comes from what was only recently the most warlike nation on this battered planet.)

Returning to “Blaue Stunde,” as an individual piece of music it stands in stunning contrast to the present-day music associated with U.S. expressions of the resurrection of the Goddess. What was performed nearly 50 years ago by the (probably murdered) Tim Buckley was wrenchingly powerful – “if you tell me of all the pain you've had/ I'll never smile again,” a line from “Phantasmagoria in Two” (a modern variant of the classic dialogue between poet and Muse), probably has no equal even in antiquity – but it has no  counterpart in today's U.S. Paganism, which has become like the USian people themselves, oppressively submissive. A good example is Loreena McKennitt's work, which was originally unapologetically Pagan, but which she has since – no doubt under severe external pressure – diligently repositioned as New-Age-ecumenical instead. Indeed – and despite the sometimes-bold content of its lyrics – in its new, self-consciously de-Paganized context, it often comes off more as lamentation than celebration or defiance. (And as I know all too well from my various odysseys into the organized versions of U.S. Goddess-centered Paganism, the decidedly serf-like passivity of its participants [and therefore of much of its present-day music] goes hand-in-hand with its definitively oppressed and obnoxiously oppressive we-are-all-victims pacifism. The result is a vehement but implicitly frightened [maybe-if-we-aren't-militant-they-won't-kill-us] rejection of politics in any form – which is of course the source of the real U.S. Left's unmitigated scorn of Paganism as “no different from many other religion in being just another opiate to facilitate the oppression of the masses” [the quote is from a Marxian comrade] – and which therefore provides us with a classic example, as valid as the induced racism and sexism that forever fragments the U.S. Working Class,  of “divide et impera” in action.)

It is an aside, albeit a pointedly relevant one, to note the curious anachronism within the Buckley video linked above. The song was recorded in 1967, while the video – obviously made by someone who recognized the poetic vision that was the wellspring of Buckley's best work – was made in 2011. Though he has been dead since 1975, and though the relatively free world of the '70s was almost indescribably different from the slave-world of today, in the parlance of hipster poets and musicians, “Tim Buckley Lives.” Indeed there may be no greater praise the human mind can formulate.

That said, “Blaue Stunde” is truly a horse of a different sort (if you will pardon the spontaneous emergence of a stream-of-subconscious reference to the Celtic/Scythian Goddess Epona), with what kind of horse she is revealed by the accompany drumming. “Blaue Stunde” is ritual dance, yes, but it has none of the implicit submissiveness that has come to define so much U.S. paganism, which given the omnipresence of the secret police (and precisely as suggested by the semiotic evidence I cited above), has probably been infiltrated and co-opted much as Women's Liberation was infiltrated and co-opted – so that the depth of one's commitment is now defined by only by one's material success. As the mainstream brand of U.S. feminism is surely Ayn Rand feminism, so it seems there is also a mainstream Ayn Rand Paganism. Such is the Pavlovian power of capitalism, specifically the mind-mangling might of Madison Avenue.

What first caught my attention about “Blaue Stunde” – what prompted me to seek out the lyrics (and what so surprised me about their content) – was obvious militance of the music. Focusing more closely, I realized it was the drumwork, which, when I began actually hearing it, stood my hair on end with that wondrous chill of recognition. Note the four-beat drum-flourish at the end of certain lines in the lyrics:

“And the pale light of dawn outlined
Her head adorned by the morning dew” (drum flourish).

“Her fairy-like limbs were white as the moon
Her hair was like made of gold” (drum flourish).

Note also the drum riffs elsewhere in the piece.

What I realized, listening so intently, is “Blaue Stunde,” despite its poignant beauty, is most assuredly not the music of submission. It is instead the music of active resistance. Indeed – though I do not know how I knew it – I suddenly recognized the drums as  war drums, the sort of tribal ritual that is a prelude to a battle and the sort of music that accompanies you as you advance across open ground against a vastly superior enemy, you assuming you will not live to see the next moonrise or maybe even the next minute but not really giving a damn because that is the desperation to which you have been driven by the foe's depredations and yet by some miracle not only you yourself survive but so do most of your comrades and in the end you have won the day and won the future – perhaps as if Boudicca and all she symbolized had triumphed on that fateful morning in the midlands of Albion somewhere north of the still smoldering ruins of Londinium or if Wounded Knee had become the beginning of a victorious rising rather than the end of First Nations resistance. Whatever, I glimpsed it clearly for a moment, by the time-reference provided by its weaponry sometime in the pre-atomic past or more likely in the post-apocalyptic future...

(“And the pale light of dawn outlined
Her head adorned by the morning dew”)

I am as you know given to reject such mind's-eye visions unless I am able to rationalize them at least to the extent of recognizing their real-time sources, and of course I have since tried to do that with “Blaue Stunde” and have succeeded to the extent of recognizing the longer riffs with the congas echoing as if through slumlord streets, the rhythm identical to what one so often heard on the Lower East Side during the weeks after the Tompkins Park (Police) Riot of 1967, as an organization called Jade Companions of the Flower Dance briefly united Hippies and Hispanics in common resistance to the invading cops and thrill-seeking suburban phonies. Verily, if I may be allowed to paraphrase Dylan, “red lights flashing in the hot Manhattan night,” complete with drums echoing ominously 24/7. 

Faun's eclectic combination of drums and pipes in “Blaue Stunde” also reminded me of an incident during one of the anti-Vietnam War protest marches when maybe 500 or 1000 Caucasian thugs had bottled up the entire 500,000-person demonstration in Central Park and kept us there until the members of the Columbia University Pipe Band edged their way to the front of the crowd, formed themselves into what a half-century earlier would have been a line of battle and, skirling their pipes and drumming a rhythm similar to (or maybe even identical to) that of "Blaue Stunde," led us out of the park and onto Fifth Avenue. The thugs, some of whom had baseball bats or chains and who were brazenly countenanced by the cops (as was commonplace in those days), fled in obvious fear as soon as the pipers began leading the advance.

But what it was about the punctuational drum flourishes in “Blaue Stunde” that first caught my attention remains undefined, never mind the undeniable recognition implicit in the initial chill. Though now as I think of it I believe I remember reading or hearing somewhere – most likely both as the reality of music remains beyond the descriptive ability of linear language – such drum-emphasis was, along with stringed instruments and pipes, characteristic of ancient epic poetry.

As to the use of genuine love poetry as inspiration to resistance, the only people I know of in the modern age to have done so are Celts...and of course Russians, in which context note “Beriozka” (Birch Tree), a favorite of the Red Army in World War II and – because birch is used in making musical instruments – an invocation of Yulya,  one of the many Slavonic names for the Goddess – hence the chorus: variations on the theme of “Yulee, Yulee lovely birch tree.” 
 
It was so beloved by the Red Army, it was recorded by the Red Army Chorus and Dance Troupe.  and just for retro-kicks, here it is, static and all, as I heard it via the 78-rpm music of my earliest childhood.  Then of course there is how it is formally danced, in this instance preceded  by some of the most stunningly hypnotic choreography I have yet seen:   With this sort of aesthetic quality commonplace elsewhere, no wonder the rest of the  world damns us as “nyekulturniy.”

Not really relevant to this essay (which began as the sort free-association, semi-stream-of-consciousness thing Cate so often inspires whenever she and I talk or exchange emails) – or maybe relevant in some way I don't yet see – is the Faun piece that, were I a videographer, I would use – as I stated in an OAN essay in 2012 – as the accompaniment to that incredible footage of the horse rescue in Holland c. 2005.

Quoth Buffy Sainte-Marie many years ago, when only allegedly nutso people like myself (and unfortunately a few spooks) had any idea what obtained: “Goddess is alive/Magic is afoot”

LB/24 November – 2 December 2015

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From Synchronous Events of My Absence, a New Hope

 

Woman sharing a bowl of salad. From “Living Apart,” a work-in-progress. (Canon T5 DSLR, Canon 18mm-55mm f/3.5-f/5.6 zoom, 35mm equivalent focal lengths 28mm-90mm). Photograph by Loren Bliss © 2015. (Click on image to view it full size.)

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I BRING TO today's long-delayed writing an admittedly embryonic but unquestionably powerful sense of hope, its strength defined by its metaphorical similarity to concrete reinforced with steel or iron, the rebar beloved of structural engineers since the 15th Century or so.

Like concrete itself,  my new sense of hope contains seemingly disparate elements compounded into a robustly functional whole. The elements include one of this year's U.S. election results, Beat Generation poetry and a European musical phenomenon that began in Germany probably 15 years ago but really started with the folk-music revival  of the 1950s. Think of the political elements and the poetry as the aggregate, the music as the rebar, and the bonding element as the groundswell of obviously rising anger against capitalism's ever-more-methodical victimization of the 99 Percent.

Alas – albeit with apologies to those whose concept of dialectical materialism still stubbornly excludes the (misleadingly named) “supernatural” – we cannot discuss hope of this sort without first considering the prophetic function of art.

Like the core wisdom at the heart of the present-day Gaia Hypothesis  – the now-revolutionary notion our planet is alive, conscious and self-regulating – the prophetic function of art is a breathtakingly ancient concept. Its origins are lost in the ignorance and suppressed knowledge that unfortunately shrouds most of our species' 200,000 years. But what we are learning of so-called “primitive” peoples suggests it, like the Gaian ethos, was among the definitive characteristics of human society until the advent of patriarchy – a tragedy Barbara Mor  convincingly defines as humanity's one and only unnatural act – the precursor to the cancerous shrinking of human consciousness to the zomboid moral imbecility  necessitated by and for the maintenance of capitalist profit and growth.

During the five or six millennia that followed patriarchy's emergence, the tyrannies essential to expanding and sustaining it methodically marginalized art to exclude public awareness not just of its prophetic potential, but of all its psychological and ritualistic potencies, which the patriarchal authorities (correctly) feared as dangerously subversive. This was – and is – the fear implicit in the persecutions of art and artists launched even now by the Abrahamic religions and by the patriarchal authorities in general. It is the real reason that under capitalism, which is revealed by its master-slave dichotomy to be patriarchy in economic disguise, art has been officially marginalized, first to decoration and/or entertainment, ultimately to an esoteric medium by which the One Percenters declare their financial and cultural status, mostly to one another.

But some ideas – especially those powerful enough to evoke the spinal-chill imprimatur that signifies an encounter with poetic truth – refuse to be suppressed. Thus, just as the scientists James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis would propose the Gaia Hypothesis in 1972 (appropriately, its name was suggested by the novelist William Golding), so in 1933 did Carl Jung rescue the notion of art-as-prophecy  from obscurity. Marshall McLuhan followed suit in 1964,  proclaiming art “a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.”

Enter, as exemplars, three categories of art: Edvard Munch's four versions of The Scream (1893-1910) ; Allen Ginsberg's  “Howl” (1956) and Faun's  “Alba” (2011), here on the album Eden.

The four portraits in the Scream series are expressions of stark horror, all the more intense for the fact we are left to imagine their source. Though the anguish in the opening line of “Howl” could surely describe what it was Munch found so horrific:

I have seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness...

But 55 years later in “Alba,” we discover the suggestion those seemingly endless years of unmitigated darkness may at last be ending:

Lauf nicht davon, ich lann den Morgen sehen
Wir liefen writ, nun lassen wir den Winter ziehen.

In English, in the context of the piece itself, this translates to:

Do not run [anymore from the cold and darkness], I can see the morning.
We ran far [enough], let the winter pull us [as it might].

McLuhan's art-as-warning hypothesis provided, as many OAN readers will no doubt recall my having said before, a key part of the conceptual framework of “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer,” which defined the 1960s Counterculture – largely on the basis of its art and its expansion of female-male relationship models – as the first wave of a global revolution against patriarchy. That book, the product of 24 years of research conducted mostly in the spare moments allowed by a newspaper career, went unpublished because its manuscript, photographs and research notes were destroyed in a 1983 fire, probably arson.

Now, particularly with the addition of Jung's observations, the notion of art-as-prophecy applied to Faun (and thus to the renaissance of goddess-centered paganism that is sweeping Europe), gives us a profoundly reassuring glimpse of our post-apocalyptic future. It tells us the capitalists were not able to kill the Counterculture after all – that its anti-patriarchal aesthetic is thriving in Europe and, despite the vehement opposition of the One Percent, is now by a kind of cultural osmosis seeping back into the USian homeland – all of which, especially from the Jungian perspective, suggests our species is making psychic and psychological preparations for its future. The long term implication is that we will survive the disasters thrust on us by capitalism, and that we will eventually emerge from the shark-womb of capitalism's toxic darkness with a genuinely healing vision of ourselves, our Mother Earth and the universe of which we are part.

The point at which all these seemingly random impressions coalesced into a synchronistic whole was an apparently coincidental conversation with a much younger woman named Suzanne at the 15 Now Tacoma election-night party celebrating last week's vote by a 70 percent majority of Tacomans (see here,  here and here)  to raise the minimum wage.

Though the proposed $15 minimum wage did not win – the (obviously intimidated) voters overwhelmingly chose the $12 minimum instead – the victory was clearly 15 Now's. Their campaign so frightened theTacoma-Pierce County Chamber of Commerce, it ordered the Tacoma City Council to put the $12-eventually option on the ballot in competition with the $15-immediately proposed by initiative.

Persons unfamiliar with USian municipal government should note that “ordered” is most assuredly not hyperbole. As in most cities of the imperial homeland, the overwhelming economic resources of the local chamber of commerce grants it absolute power. Tacoma is no exception. Note the lockstep opposition the chamber mustered in its unsuccessful effort to unseat City Councilman Anders Ibsen.  In essence the chamber owns outright seven of Tacoma's nine city council members – precisely as a medieval baron might have owned the lesser aristocrats who were his vassals.

The result was a ballot that first asked whether the voter supported a minimum-wage increase and next asked whether the wage should be raised to $12 per hour or to $15. The chamber obviously hoped the question's complexity would result in a negative vote. And the chamber's hope was a rational one: Washington state voters have a long history of rejecting any ballot measure that requires careful thought.

But...as Bob Dylan prophesied back in 1964, “the times they are a-changing.”

The magnitude of that change is apparent in how a small and profoundly dedicated group of women and men – a cadre of about 25 people supported by about 115 additional volunteers (most of them avowed socialists) – gained a victory for the Tacoma Working Class that two years earlier was unimaginable.

(Disclosure: I was one of the original 15 Now Tacoma volunteers, but dropped out late last year after a potentially fatal kidney infection taught me to be less forgetful of my age – then 74 – and to be more miserly with my time.)

The broader significance of the minimum-wage victory lies in the fact approximately 60 percent of the Tacoma's workers – individual women and men but mostly families with children – are officially “lower income.” This means they struggle to survive on earnings of less than $30,000 per year. Forced into poverty by outsourcing, downsizing and other expressions of capitalist savagery, they (like so many other members of the USian 99 Percent) originally saw themselves as powerless to resist.

But the victory of raising their own pay by the electoral process has shown them they have the option of fighting back and winning.

Their triumph – and that is truly what it was – thus provides a potent object lesson in how organization and solidarity translate into a restoration of the collective power formerly provided by unions – the very power the local Ruling Class imagined had been abolished forever.

Suzanne, whose eyes, depending on the light, wondrously change from blue to green and back to blue again, broadened the focus of our conversation to what else might be done to foster Working Class resistance. It came to me then that in the wildly growing popularity of music by Faun and other such unapologetically pagan groups and individual musicians – all of them agitator-bards in service to the re-emergent Muse and the revolution she symbolizes – there is the promise of the far more elemental transformation necessary to bring about a society in which the ruling ethos is not infinite greed and selfishness but rather the ancient notion of “from each according to ability, to each according to need.”

Which – never mind the fact Faun is a continent away – makes especially appropriate its transformation of the chorus from “Alba” into an anthem of joyful defiance.  On the foregoing linked video it follows, most appropriately I think, Yulya Ayuna Kholeva's exquisite but too-brief Belorussian fire dance.

      ...I can see the morning. We ran far...

LB/30 September-9 November 2015

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