Back-dated, time-traveled, and arrived at your windowledge.
Tuesday, December 02, 2008
Can’t shake the dawn
Dawn, curling its toes around humanity
the disengenuous, the tenative
humanity
who shrinks from difficulty like a snail from salt
the solid rock bite too strong,
raises her voice,
She says, look what time it is
here in the unfleshed houses
You bathe your bodies in scent and status
to remind yourself to forget
how hard it is
when you live by the land
how lovely it is
to have no posessions
how strange it is
to be a new kind of shaman
with all your trappings of success.
You see, my children suffered.
The Dawn’s children took their meals when I administered them
and took their water from my consent.
You tap the earth, and rightly so
but you’ve forgotten what it is to know the sweet taste
of spring
after a winter of suffering
and what it is to know the morning
after the longest night of the forest.
Dawn looked sharply at the river running through her,
the silver snake twining, spinning new stories
snake of knowledge biting, snake of mercurial ink,
messenger, winged serpent on the stone.
Snake River, she said, rise up in me
Rise up in my children and remind them
that the Matrix may have them, that Paradise might be Lost,
but that you can’t take the dawn’s warmth
from the winter frost
and you can’t shake the snow
without my light
rising
rising
rising up right.
riday, December 12, 2008
Another world
I dreamed of these ruins of a carnival and an old house in the desert, like recent ruins, but they’d been dried with sand and time.
Which really isn’t much different from the way things are here. When a building project goes under or a mall isn’t making enough money, it’s just left to rot, there is no infrastructure to tear it down, leaving this weirdly apocalyptic world next to pristine marble mansions and gardens that rival Nebuchadnezzar’s.
I went to the Red Sea yesterday and thankfully, a world does exist beneath the desert. You get quite a sense of just how much of an ocean floor the desert really is when you’re over here…miles and miles of flat sand with sparse vulcan hills flicking off the sky in defiance. The ocean is amazing, once you swim out past where all the coral has died and see the last living thing before the big drop. It looked just like Finding Nemo, all the fish were intensely colorful and the rocks swam with the current…like hair moving on a giant stone head.
This is incredible until you realize that every single ecosystem in the ocean is dying, and it is a direct result of our influence. When you swim out there, you forget about things going on on the land. The madness of religion, the political pandering, the shallow view of humanity that’s expressed in our insane desire for the material. You forget that all of this could be over in a second, that no politician ever follows through with the promises they make, and that the world is in a state of extreme unbalance.
You forget, and you remember, too.
You remember that it wasn’t that long ago that we had to swim out to sea to catch our food, that we made the most of each day because life was much shorter, that we lived through our myths and that a rite of passage was essential to each person living in the culture. You remember that a fish is just a person is just a planet is just a star system in a galaxy floating along the reef of a vast, vast universe…you remebmer that the stars are plankton, a whale is a nebula, and that the deepest Mariana Trench, to a tiny fish, is no where near as massive as the supermassive black holes that spin all of creation around its dark unknown.
For these memories, I am grateful. But like Odysseus, who was tempted by the beautiful Calypso of the Sea, who would have chosen him among all men as her lover forever, and whom he turned away because his heart was back in Ithaca, the Sea can’t make me forget everything. This is the second Full Moon here for me, second since that one in October that changed everything, that keeps my heart in Ithaca even when I’m out in the land of the Lotus Eaters gathering knowledge from the old world.
I’ve been puzzling over a recent bout of apathy that seems to have come over nearly everyone I know. It seems as though, in recent days, the whole world has gone mad. Haiti is destroyed and facing massive “reformation” under the IMF; privatization and increases in cost of Haiti’s electricity and water threaten to return this nation to its former bondage. Nevermind the fact that bottlenecks are being purposefully and strategically imposed on Haiti’s citizens. 13 cases of torture of Palestinian children in Israeli custody are being brought before the U.N. Saudi warplanes are decimating Yemen, again. News coverage largely ignored the footage shot by Yemeni civilians of a U.S. airstrike now nearly four weeks ago.
Oh, and it now comes out that the Council of Europe wants to investigate whether or not Swine Flu was a hoax. Shocking.
I do not want history to disappear in apathy. I have to admit, life would be much easier for all of us if we just accepted our role as cash cows for global privatization of every aspect of our lives. It would be easier if we could just turn off that nagging, aching pain in our hearts ever time we hear the word, “Freedom.” It would be easier if we could just accept that Terrorists want to Kill Us All and that Islam is a bastion of the Antichrist.
But I can’t. I won’t, and I never will.
And my reasoning works like this. Would you trust an institution, belief system, or collection of individuals who knowingly:
B) Systematically forced the removal of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, leaving them homeless, to fullfill a dream of a Zionist state of Israel, which completely goes against every teaching in Christianity, Judaism, and any person with a conscience.
F) Do I even have to mention 9/11? And the ensuing trauma perpetrated against Iraq and Afghanistan, nations that supposedly, according to the “official” story, didn’t even comprise half of the ethnic ratio of the 19 “hijackers”? Not that Saddam Hussein was a saint, but who put him in power in the first place? One hint: it wasn’t Osama Bin Laden.
Do you trust them? Do you really trust them, over evidence like this? Do you know people who have felt the burn of their brand on their skin? Have you worked with Palestinians, talked with them, shared stories of loved ones? Do you know Iraqis? Afghanis? Do you know any Muslims at all? What about South Africans who survived Apartheid? I do. I’ve listened to their stories. And I am sorry to say that I don’t know any Haitians, yet, or Rwandans, or Bosnians, or Venezuelans. But I do know one thing that connects us all. We are humans. We have souls. We have a spirit that is eternal and will not be destroyed by any materialist imperialism. They can take our bodies, our lives, our homes, our possessions; they can decimate our environment, privatize our right to exist; but they cannot take our true freedom. We are immortal beings having a human experience. When this is realized, no bondage can contain us.
Hey kids,
Delphi here, lettin’ ya’ll know that I’m going to be startig a radio talk show on The Global Reality Network on Saturdays at 4-5pm. This coming Saturday, January 16th, is the first episode.
SO LISTEN UP!!
I’ll be mostly examining esoteric literature and poetry, ancient civilizations, and mythology, but in doing so I’d like YOUR HELP on topics that YOU want to learn about. I will also take emails with dreams or other experiences that you would like me to help you interpret or comprehend better. Emails can be sent to: thedelphireport@gmail.com
Thank you in advance for any feedback you might take time out to give. Reading suggestions, music suggestions, and topic suggestions are all up for grabs, guys, so take advantage of this! Let’s start a revolution of the mind, body, and soul!
Recently, the mainstream media has been asserting that there is a vehement terrorist threat coming from Yemen. I’m not going to post links to verify this claim, as it’s pretty common knowledge. However, a listener of my good friend Josh Reeves’ Global Reality Show sent him this interesting link:
The Queen then “dimmed” her kingdom [see right] in Yemen and moved her entourage to Ethiopia, confounded her language to Himyaritic, a copy of the Ark was made and she allowed the buried palace and its courtyard to be consumed by the desert sands. There it remained for almost 3000 years until it was discovered by Wendell Philips, ironically the character on whom Indiana Jones was based in the movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark.
(Inscription [right] describes the mother “M” dimming her nation for the love of the Lord.)
DO NOT OPEN — a warning
In the Yemen museum there is another stone which dictates the conditions that should exist prior to any attempt at opening the chamber. These include the occupation of the land by a “friendly” nation and the warning that the Ark must not be moved and should not be used for any national or personal benefit. The Ark is to be used for the benefit of all mankind and petitions (asking for special favors) to the Lord are to be made by collective prayer in the area of the buried Chamber and through the “priests” of the Ark (Menelik?).
Following the burial of the chamber and the surrounding temple, Queen Saba “dimmed her kingdom” and moved to Ethiopia with the prohibition that the area where the Ark and Menelik were buried should be forgotten, lest future hostile nations and “blind prophets” should seek it out.
Now, I find this all very intriguing considering the recent discoveries of so many ancient rock sites in Saudi Arabia.
Considering what we know about Iraqi antiquity acquisitions, is it really plausible to think that this isn’t a peice of what is going on with the demonization of Yemen? A return of the Ark of the Covenant to Jerusalem would mean extreme power for those who possess it.
On a side note, I would like to verify the claim that the author makes in the beginning of this article that:
Prior to 1948 there was a very large Jewish population that lived and thrived in Yemen. There were Temples and Jewish neighborhoods next to Mosques. Children and adults of both faiths and traditions enjoyed eachothers companionship and commerce.
In 1948 the State of Israel was formed in the land occupied for millennia by the Palestinians. The welcome mat was out for any Jewish people who wanted to come to their new homeland and most of the Jews in Yemen left. It was a sad time for most Yemenis and the economy struggled to adjust with the sudden loss of such fine craftsmen. Even today, Yemen is famous for its filagree silver jewelry yet it is no longer manufactured because of the loss of the Jewish artisans.
In Yemen you can see countless examples of Jewish Stars, incorporated in the architecture of stone buildings and mausoleums. It was a testament to an era when there was no religious conflict. But that all changed when the new State of Israel forced out and killed the Palestinians, burnt and bulldozed their farms and orchards and continued to mistreat their Arab neighbors. Gradually, like most Arab nations in the world today, they grew intolerant and hostile.
…With an experience that my parents had of the Middle East in the 1970s. In Iran, Jewish metalsmiths worked alongside Muslim and Christian merchants up until the Revolution in 1979. Sure, things were stressed, but my parents personally bought a beautiful silver platter from a famous Jewish metalsmith while traveling through Esfahan, Iran. The metalsmith did not live in fear.
There CAN and there WILL be a way to peace. The control and contorsion of the world’s resources is a vain attempt to manipulate a power that the greedy do not understand. The funding of the false state of Israel was simply a way to create chaos in a place of extreme power. All people were seeded from the same Source of life, all people are blessed by the hand of their God, however they choose to conceive it, and all people will one day live peacefully together again. This is the true Covenant between God and Humanity.
I am no fan of tyranny, but I do think the elections in Iran are the harbingers of a coming destabilization project meant to “save the Iranians” the way we “saved” Iraqis:
Even the American left-wing has endorsed the U.S. government’s propaganda. Writing in The Nation, Robert Dreyfus’s presents the hysterical views of one Iranian dissident as if they are the definitive truth about “the illegitimate election,” terming it “a coup d’etat.”
What is the source of the information for the U.S. media and the American puppet states?
Nothing but the assertions of the defeated candidate, the one America prefers.
However, there is hard evidence to the contrary. An independent, objective poll was conducted in Iran by American pollsters prior to the election. The pollsters, Ken Ballen of the nonprofit Center for Public Opinion and Patrick Doherty of the nonprofit New America Foundation, describe their poll results in the June 15 Washington Post. The polling was funded by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and was conducted in Farsi “by a polling company whose work in the region for ABC News and the BBC has received an Emmy award.”*
The poll results, the only real information we have at this time, indicate that the election results reflect the will of the Iranian voters. Among the extremely interesting information revealed by the poll is the following:
“Many experts are claiming that the margin of victory of incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was the result of fraud or manipulation, but our nationwide public opinion survey of Iranians three weeks before the vote showed Ahmadinejad leading by a more than 2 to 1 margin — greater than his actual apparent margin of victory in Friday’s election.
Auspicious, considering Obama’s Middle East talk on June 4, which is the impetus for the majority of this post.
Spare change, loose change, but none we really believe in.
The symbolic act is one which incorporates the literal while evoking the metaphysical. Symbols arguably are more effective, efficient, and can produce longer-lasting control mechanisms than most physical actions. They pervade our advertising, media, and corporate loyalties; they irrefutably control our belief systems, religious and political. I believe Barack Obama is one of our most symbolic presidents yet. As Middle East historian Mark Levine says, “the West, and the US in particular, has a habit of taking symbols too seriously.” Levine is addressing the open-handed goalpost speech and promises made to the Middle East in the early part of Obama’s administration. While it is arguable that merely changing our symbolic vocabulary towards Islamic countries has a strong effect on popular support, it is also reminiscent of a rhetoric echoed by Bzrezinski of all countries facing hegemonic domination:
A mythical historical narrative to justify the case for such a protracted and potentially expanding war is already being articulated. Initially justified by false claims about WMD’s in Iraq, the war is now being redefined as the “decisive ideological struggle” of our time, reminiscent of the earlier collisions with Nazism and Stalinism. In that context, Islamist extremism and al Qaeda are presented as the equivalents of the threat posed by Nazi Germany and then Soviet Russia, and 9/11 as the equivalent of the Pearl Harbor attack which precipitated America’s involvement in World War II.
It is this construction of a new , untouchable narrative that worries me. A narrative of uncorrupted, audacious, and nearly impenetrable “Hope” has established not only a new definition of the empathetic hero, but a new heroic paradigm that, if confronted, will garner exponentially more support from the population than that of a tyrannical fearmonger. The narrative of a turning point, a real “Good Guy” in the driver’s seat, is pervasive; the passivity that previously dulled the so-called “movements” in the past has now been co-opted, branded, and repackaged. And we swallow. And with good reason; Obama and is a genius with words, and words are symbolic resonances at the core of human experience.
I propose we do a side-by-side comparison of his June 4, 2009 Cairo speech to the Muslim world, and his June 4, 2008 speech at the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, for a closer inspection of the symbolic resonance. Interesting that the dates are exactly one year apart.
Stylistically, the two follow a similar tactical rhetoric:
June 08:
I first became familiar with the story of Israel when I was 11 years old. I learned of the long journey and steady determination of the Jewish people to preserve their identity through faith, family and culture. Year after year, century after century, Jews carried on their traditions, and their dream of a homeland, in the face of impossible odds.
June 09:
Part of this conviction is rooted in my own experience. I am a Christian, but my father came from a Kenyan family that includes generations of Muslims. As a boy, I spent several years in Indonesia and heard the call of the azaan at the break of dawn and the fall of dusk. As a young man, I worked in Chicago communities where many found dignity and peace in their Muslim faith.
June 09:
So let there be no doubt: Islam is a part of America. And I believe that America holds within her the truth that regardless of race, religion, or station in life, all of us share common aspirations – to live in peace and security; to get an education and to work with dignity; to love our families, our communities, and our God. These things we share. This is the hope of all humanity
June 08:
Finally, let there be no doubt: I will always keep the threat of military action on the table to defend our security and our ally Israel. Sometimes there are no alternatives to confrontation. But that only makes diplomacy more important. If we must use military force, we are more likely to succeed, and will have far greater support at home and abroad, if we have exhausted our diplomatic efforts.
June 09:
This is a difficult responsibility to embrace. For human history has often been a record of nations and tribes subjugating one another to serve their own interests. Yet in this new age, such attitudes are self-defeating. Given our interdependence, any world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will inevitably fail. So whatever we think of the past, we must not be prisoners of it. Our problems must be dealt with through partnership; progress must be shared.
June 08:
Not when there are still voices that deny the Holocaust. Not when there are terrorist groups and political leaders committed to Israel’s destruction. Not when there are maps across the Middle East that don’t even acknowledge Israel’s existence, and government-funded textbooks filled with hatred toward Jews. Not when there are rockets raining down on Sderot, and Israeli children have to take a deep breath and summon uncommon courage every time they board a bus or walk to school.
June 09:
Palestinians must abandon violence. Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and does not succeed. For centuries, black people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights. It was a peaceful and determined insistence upon the ideals at the center of America’s founding. This same story can be told by people from South Africa to South Asia; from Eastern Europe to Indonesia. It’s a story with a simple truth: that violence is a dead end. It is a sign of neither courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to blow up old women on a bus. That is not how moral authority is claimed; that is how it is surrendered.
June 08:
That is the change we need in our foreign policy. Change that restores American power and influence. Change accompanied by a pledge that I will make known to allies and adversaries alike: that America maintains an unwavering friendship with Israel, and an unshakeable commitment to its security.
June 09:
I know that for many, the face of globalization is contradictory. The Internet and television can bring knowledge and information, but also offensive sexuality and mindless violence. Trade can bring new wealth and opportunities, but also huge disruptions and changing communities. In all nations – including my own – this change can bring fear. Fear that because of modernity we will lose of control over our economic choices, our politics, and most importantly our identities – those things we most cherish about our communities, our families, our traditions, and our faith.
I watched In the Valley of Elah last night, and at first I was skeptical that it was going to be good. It seemed like a typical murder mystery: soldier comes home from Iraq, goes AWOL, they find his body cut up and burned, and think it’s linked to drugs. You know, because they don’t drug test in Iraq and those Mexican gangs selling Meth just pray on returning soldiers. Which does happen. But what really happened was WAY more fucked up. WAY more. Can I stress how WAY MORE FUCKED UP what really happened was than a soldier who’s got a drug problem, tries to score on his first weekend back, and ends up getting fucked over and brutally murdered by a dealer? Yeah, that’s fucked up. But the plot reveals no stereotypical Hollywood ending. So if you haven’t seen the movie, watch it. Because when it’s all said and done, and you’re shivering in your blanket, eyes wide and tears brimming, there’s a moment when it all sinks in: it really happened.
Let me make this clear: I believe it’s important to defend yourself. Sometimes that means killing people. If anyone ever tried to hurt my dog, or my niece, or one of my friends, or my parents, and I was physically there and could physically stop it, even if it meant killing them with whatever tools available, if they weren’t going to stop, I’d kill them. I’ve killed a water moccasin with a hoe because he was nesting next to my horse and almost struck my mom. I felt bad, because he was just doing what any old snake would do, but it was necessary. Killing him made me feel sick to my stomach. It was just a snake, you say. Well, it was life. It was blood and flesh and fangs bared. Death is a part of life, though, and sometimes life needs death to continue. I’m a relatively strict vegetarian, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to lay my head on the tracks while my rights or the rights of those I love are railroaded over.
What I’m opposed to is violent, spiritual, tortured death. It happens when you’re raped. It happens when you’re tortured. It happens to factory-farmed animals in a slaughterhouse. It happens when “preemptive war” becomes synonymous with “Patriotism.” It happens when you come home from a cesspool of atrocity and can’t deal with the shallow materialistic hologram of reality that is American culture, and you blow your own brains out. It happens when you’re a 21 year old boy given a gun and told to shoot brown people, and then told it’s okay to laugh, it’s how you deal. And it happens so frequently and with such fervor in war that I have no doubt that there is some cyclical need, not by all people, but by the few who manipulate the many, to keep the heart of a blood thirsty god pumping by gorging itself on a feast of human suffering. It’s a cult of death, people. Plain and simple, dark and furious.
So that’s where I stand. It’s a lonely little place that’s got a few supporters, but our numbers are growing. When people talk about the casualties of this war, and how there are so few in comparison to every other war we’ve had (none of which, by the way, have been formally declared since World War II), I just want to scream. It doesn’t matter if it’s one person or thousands. I don’t think people realize the effects of torture, either. It doesn’t just affect the person being tortured. It’s the torturer who has to keep on living with her or himself, and it’s the taxpayers on the other side of the ocean who go to sleep every night with nary a thought that their money is funding systematic soul-killing.
That’s it. That’s where I stand. I don’t want a child to grow up in this world. I want to change it. And it’s cold over here, but it’s getting warmer.
