Pembroke at Wit's End
Jardim da Saúde
São Paulo, SP
Brasil

August 17, 2006      

  

My dear Gloria,

My experience has shown me that love hurts, but also that it is the only thing that matters. This CD, Tears and Rage: Musical Comments on Love and Existence from Me and my mostly Romantic Friends, is part of an Artistic Project (involving my Websites as well) that examines my intimate bonds and treats their love, glory and beauty veiled in pain and confusion, tears and rage.

My experiences with the Intimate Other can be seen in terms of key relationships expressing feelings of love, passion, separation and despair more or less in this order, but expressed in differing ways. The first instance was of the Krishna with the milkmaids type, and came with Patty Sessiva, my best and only friend in the world from 3-5 years old. The magic of that love is touched on no where so clearly as in Fern Hill, the most beautiful poem in the English language.

Now as I was young and easy under tha apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light

And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams.

All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
And playing, lovely and watery
And fire green as grass.
And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars
Flying with the ricks, and horses
Flashing into the dark.
 
And then to awake, and the farm like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
The sky gathered round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
Out of the whinnying green stable
On to the fields of praise.

And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new-made clouds and happy as the heart was long
In the sun born over and over
I ran my heedless ways,
My wishes raced through the house-high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace.

Nothing I cared in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow-thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

We, Adam and maiden, ran naked together graced by the sun in a field where they later built the HoHoKus firehouse. To give an idea of the character of this adamantine bond, together with most of my poems (the first is below) over the years, in 1969 in Oakland, California, various relational guidelines came from the muse of this irreducible love, including: "Give only that which is fully taken; take only that which is fully given; beyond, beware!", "The road to Hell is getting your own way!".

The relationship was of the type Hildred Geertz might call lé/nduk with a warmth and intensity that I have not been able to find the equal of up to now. Suddenly she and her family moved to Florida and I never saw her again. I still cry. After she left, I went through my first time of Tartarus, when I examine the pain and lick the wounds. The agony inspired me to go out killing yellow jackets with a wet cloth and getting stung by them in turn called by the scorching rage with existence they and I share. For us, the meaning of the Other rests in the pain of separation and being, suffering, bearing this pain eventually brings relief, because, as we all know, "pain hurts and I don't like it", and, in as much as that's true universally, eventually everybody gets out of the way of a lara djonggrang (Javanese) or nefer (Egyptian), a great standing pain, allowing you to sort out and join with your love once again. The more pain, the quicker this process works. Simple Ishtarian mechanics: ever-so-lovely Soraya Landim (It had become a glimmering girl with apple blossom in her hair who called me by my name and ran and faded in the brightening air...) would surely understand and, dare I hope, someday beam that incredible smile of hers once again for me. After all, existence is really just an overly long kung fu movie marking pain's bitter path to release in justice, i.e., revenge ("sweeter far than the dripping of honey"). But after the denouement of our current stinking story, entitled I Didn't Wanna be Caught from their side or Read 'em and Weep from ours, the final episode of an execrable epic, King of the Mountain, we move on to Beauties and the Beast in Gloucester with our lovely Crown Wards, to wit, naming just a few, Liz Hurley, Soraya Landim, Gillian Bonner, Enya, Emiko Kobashikawa, Sarah Brightman, Lynn Ferguson, Nigella Lawson, Loreena McKennitt, Beatrix Pfleiderer, Thais Hinawara, Jolene Blalock, Regie Pfleiderer, I�neke de Clare, Lexa Doig, Angelina Jolie, Sinead O'Connor, Magali Rolfsen, Evelyn Glennie, Kyra Knightly, Winona Rider, Cathy Craig, Penny Goslin, Sela Ward, Jane Millspaw, Tatiana Vinogradova, Linda Reilly, Joan Ifland, Silvia Colloca, Pierrina Andritsi, Penelope Cruz, Irina Kodin, Mary King, Noni Dounia, Anabel Moses, Olga Kopylova, Mindy Bergner, Evelina Papantonio, Stephie Smith, Evie Adam, Margo Bird, Stephie Hoover, Ioanna Lili et alia, joined now and always with Clarisse Scarab Gwynedd and me in Sacred and Eternal Wedlock, a state and status underwritten by Pembroke, Balmoral, Tara, Langar, Stonehenge and myriad more estates. What a beautiful story!

We are one and ever will be,
Throughout all ages and tides we,
We forever anon will be
United in eternity,
United in eternity,
United forever in love.

In fact, my first experiences of this type are "constitutional" loves with divine beings like Kali, Athene, Dolma, Persephone, Isis, Hecate and the Furies, who are like me (for truly I would please them if no one else and I bow to their hands). I learned their names and the characteristics identified with them (most of them wrong, but...) in this more than strange and not overly convincing postmodern world with Mr. Maloney in 1960 in the study of mythology. This CD focuses on Hecate but in fact the others were already present before as well. One of my favorite pieces is a hymn (included in the link here) to praise and distinguish the Divine, Serene and Fierce Isis (my Shakti, if you must know, and to whom my Site is dedicated in order to never forget her expression with me as a Persian cat of infinite grace who became my spiritual guide and walked on my shoulders, looking always forward and back, and remains here now) that is not included in the pieces selected for this CD.

We have other CDs -- Tears and Rage: Musical Comments on Love and Existence from Me and my mostly Javanese Friends, Tears and Rage: Musical Comments on Love and Existence from Me and my mostly Appalled Friends, Tears and Rage: Musical Comments on Love and Existence from Me and my mostly Rock Friends, Tears and Rage: Musical Comments on Love and Existence from Me and my mostly Slavic Friends, Echoes: On Beyond Music, Perbast, but my favorite up to now is: Wasp Honey, that focuses on the definition of a being reflecting the love the I feel for these beings as persons and in a union of the "common cause" type. These unions can pass through various levels of association, devotion and warmth going from, for example, the definition of a hydra (desperation) to harpy (affection) to eventually that of a gorgon (devotion) in unions progressing through relational conditions, fears and checks ("We won't get fooled again!") in my ati sanubari connected in Ketresnan Lair Batin "Wonten ing dalem Sang Tawon, Mahasiwarupa, wonten ketresnan lair batin" and expressed in my rasa of Sadja Kusumaningratan, with me being in a state of Tapa ana ing Pertapan [gunung, jago mlilé, jago wiring-galih jalu mungal] (Sanctum meaning murni), being the Mangkudjagad e Mangkukalamangga, that unites the Adi of Surakarta Adiningrat with the Ayu of Ngayokyakarta Ayuningrat in Kusuma that defines Wasp Honey, the real beauty of the other (this type of union is always feminine and tribal) seen in reality rather than only in the heart.

A more complete discussion of the ayu/adi distinction as it appears in the division of the roles of ibu/bapak, mother/father, the Love and the Law, is here, especially in the sections "Living and Dying" and "Balance and Imbalance". There were two places in Surakarta where I saw (felt) this being joined: Kartasura, in the Mataram kraton (palace) before Baluarti, and Grogol, for reasons unknown, unless it was because of the presence of Sri Kinusuma lawan Binatari lawan Dinewi Ibu Mar. I have never in my life been in a place as hot as Grogol: independent of the temperature, the asphalt was always melting.

There were two expressions of this tendency when I was 11-12 years old. The first was with Dale Mangels, a pretty girl who sat in front of me in Mrs. Peacock's class in fifth grade (11 years old). At the end of the year I was confused to find myself going out looking for a present to express my feelings of appreciation and warmth. I liked her. I gave her a pendent on the last day of school and that night, at the "little league" baseball game, two of her friends, Lynn Mayers and Debbie Hird, came up to me and returned the pendent. Suddenly the colors of the world deepened and after running home I found myself throwing a big rock on the box with the pendent in it. The memory still troubles me.

Another illustrative situation (and my strange family context also begins to come out here) was with Stephanie Hoover, an older girl that I adored where we went every year in the summer (two weeks) in Vermont. Quimby's had everything: forest (mixed but with primordial groves of pines with velvety moss covering the ground), lakes (Forest, Big Avril, Little Avril), horses (Gumdrop "stable mascot", Big Red, Trigger, Chaos, a pinto stallion who picked me up by my ass and threw me in a ditch when I was on a pony (Trigger) in front of him without having given him any provocation at all -- thus ended my period of fascination with horses), bears, a brook (where I caught a beautiful brown trout and was devastated when I let her go and she bottomed up), the horrors of family fishing on Lake Lovelace in Canada with hellgrammites for smallmouth bass (there was an even bigger nightmare than usual on one of these cruel, masculine expeditions of indifference to everything that was happening when I got "lucky" and pulled in bass after bass while the others in the boat just watched and drooled), few people (though there was a devastatingly cute, 40-pound wildcat named Nancy Moog who called me horsey and left me severely at a disadvantage), Stephanie.

Stephanie is from Ohio and has a brother who is even older, Charlie, a genius at telling stories. One of his best presentations was a poem called "Sam McGee" (probably by Vachel Lindsey), an event so dramatic that I still remember it with chills when Sam, who was soooo cold, ended up entering into an oven with a cry of relief and was incinerated (at times I think he was talking about me and Stephie was the oven). At that same Talent Night, I presented "It's a grand night for singing" à la mode Master Skylark.

We three formed a society called Acrobiscent (Aquavescent?? Charlie was the one with words and he didn't write this one down for me) Association of America (AAA) with reference to the little bubbles of gas that smell like a fart that come out the water when you put the paddle into the bottom of a swamp. We were all co-counsels of the society with responsibilities and rights rather undetermined. He eventually became a historian and academic after studying in England (Cambridge?). According to the story I heard, Stephie ended up sleeping with the enemy in that she married a protestant minister. Yuck.

Stephie, a mignon beauty, was a vital spirit and had a skeptic's vision (this was the period of the Kingston Trio, Theodore Bikel, the Smothers Brothers, Miriam Makeba) as well as being very affectionate, and I love her forever. I even named a star after her. One day there was an organized activity called "Hare and Hound". The game involved her being a hare with a boy of her age (a lamentable person with me dying of jealousy). As a hound after them, following the trails of paper (mostly false), I ran as never before or after (with wings on my heels) for an unparalleled distance in my experience (my forte had always been sprints). I found them before they had even had a chance to sit down and wait to see if the hounds would track them down or not. Jealousy has power. I was invited to become a hare and wait for the other hounds together with them. I did, very close to her.

What makes this relationship a bit more interesting is the way we used to mark and announce our love. She (and I) wrote a marital contract for us to marry when I reached 19, her age at the time (I was 12). We took the contract written on pink paper for our parents to sign (imagine the situation defining this event) and I still have it with their signatures and my heart still locked into her grace.

In the Odyssey of my life, I have lost contact with her and Charlie. My first poem came out at Quimby's when I was 14 years old:

The truth hides its light
In the shadowy night
In the child that's never been born
It follows life's fatal trails
While man seeks and fails
But never resigns to his own.

Truth cuts through the night
Like a finger of light
That strains from some slow slamming door
It feels out its way
Then vanishes with day
Ne'er to be found anymore.

Truth's a mirage in a dream
That flees but to seem
When attacked by the cold gray of dawn
Many men preach it
But none, none dare reach it
For they're lost in the darkness they are.

I should now also set out my disturbed relationship with my extended family, in the sense of the Howes as "nobles" with the viscounts, earls and barons Howe. The Howes formed as a family in an autocratic manner and in the sense of Dux. The position 'duke' came on a tortuous and confused path (remember that England's horrifying William the Conqueror was a duke) from the Roman Empire where it was defined as a temporary focus of response during military threats to the existence of the Empire. This emergency position was then used in a "bad faith" manner by the Howes and our first cousins, the Hanovers. As a result, the underhanded Howes managed to end up with a title and position that depended on an Imperium that did not exist and this gave them authority without supervision. In fact, the understanding of this disgrace requires a careful study of the lemmas:

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

and

Cui bono?

Looking at the context, George III, the first Hanover to speak English convincingly, was falling into disgrace and madness. The foundation of the idea of "divine kingship" and legitimate authority had been the Will of the king and pleasing the king was more than moot for his subjects ("L'etat c'est moi" and "Let them eat cake"). With the regurgitation of the hapless Stewarts following the reactionary and theocratic period of Cromwell and the Puritans, authority was being eclipsed by a flood of wealth without established value that entered into England as a result of advanced arms and the shameful traditions of mercantilism and piracy of Drake, Raleigh et alia, sucking the blood of the colonies and much of the rest of the world (look at what is at the British Museum and the wealth of England's old manors).

As we will see below, at this instance in connection with the Crown, the Howes manipulated circumstances and obtained a viscountcy with the colors and trappings of a dukedom, which now appears to have been spuriously tied into the pre-Norman kingdom of Leinster (Laighen), brought to Pembroke (though held on feudal grant of the ever anxious and murderous Henry II) through Richard de Clare's marriage in 1170 to Aoife (Eva), daughter of Dermot MacMurrough, the last king. Later this legitimate entailment was employed by Richard Plantagenet when, due to the peculiarities of estate law, the daughter of sonless Richard and Eva de Clare, Isabel, became Crown ward and was given in marriage to William the Marshal.

Legitimate kingdoms are proper Natural and Landed events, indelibly tying a people and the soil, rather than the arbitrary or artificial moments of Regal legerdemain manipulated by a tyrannical Crown over the centuries. One outgrowth of this problem of authority is the ever so confused notion of Divine Kingship that has plagued the western mind: authority properly rests in the land, the people and the attitudes they express in their lives, but the Church made a level effort to confuse matters by intruding into this essential bond with their ever-so-confused notion of an unaccountable God, the succor of so many tyrants. A good place to start studying legitimate authority is in Java where the principal of leadership is "where there is a lord, there is a servant" (nya gusti, nya kawula). Another excellent source of perspective is China, where the Wu's job is to connect his people to T'ien-li, their natural environment, and keep their feet on the ground such that they not end up eating the bark off trees once again. According to Chu Hsi:

The cultivation of the essential and the examination of the difference between the Principle of Nature (T'ien-li, Principle of Heaven) and human selfish desires are things that must not be interrupted for a single moment in the course of our daily activities and movement and rest. If one understands this point clearly, he will naturally not get to the point where he will drift into the popular ways of success and profit and expedient schemes. . . When one does not even know where to anchor his body and mind, he talks about. . . the task of putting the world in order as if it were a trick. Is that not mistaken?

By way of contrast, we have Richard Plantagenet, Coeur de Lion:

From the Devil we sprang and to the Devil we shall go.

The despotic Normans and Plantagenets always had problems with legitimacy. Their dilemma is witnessed in the See, Kingdom of Rome, that ended up held in Cornwall by Henry III's brother, Earl Richard, King of the Romans, due to the Crown's aggressive and expensive efforts to tie into the Holy Roman Empire and prop up flagging authority the tyrannical Normans never really had. In fact, during William the Marshal's rector regis et regni of Henry III (though many at Pembroke insist this was more properly rectum regis et regni since we ended up eating a lot of it when Henry III returned to the Plantagenets' tyrannical path and left us holding the bill arising out of his betrayal of our legitimate regency), the ever so shabby Crown got wind of the precious jewel of legitimacy held open at Pembroke and made haste to co-opt our noble seat, eventually meaning the execrable and utterly unforgiveable Jasper Tudor as earl. As the Crown, the Hanovers obtained access to a legitimate ancient Gaelic kingdom, still honored and held open through Pembroke, just as the ever-so-stubborn Cornish still carry the Kingdom of Rome. So in the flickering light of all these devious shenanigans, the Howe viscountcy in Ireland was coupled to Leinster and then fraudulently "extinguished" on the death of earl William.

On this confused and macabre basis, the family ended up defining itself in a crypto-tyrannical fashion with the world and within the corporation involved (afflicted) itself. The lack of knowledge of the matters involved in this event nowadays does not change their profound influence on the family connected with the earl Howes: it's an international scandal (as Boris Casoi would say) with me and probably Sophia Charlotte, Baroness Howe of Langar (of whom more below), among the victims, but, in fact: "The way you treat one is the way you treat all".

The figures most in evidence in this scenario, always a bit out of focus, are the two English commanders who, more than anyone else, contributed to Britain's defeat in the American Revolution. General William Howe, viscount, earl, Supreme Commander of British Forces, was a notorious conciliator, whorer and inveterate unconscionable, who was called home for spending too much time in a social whirl and allowing the rebels to retire unscathed after defeating them in battle one too mamy times. Similarly, his brother, Admiral Richard Howe, viscount, baron, earl, (known as "Black Dick" not because he was an exceptionally caring person, in fact, quite the contrary) was an open colonial sympathizer while the commander of British Naval Forces in the first couple years of the war until he too was relieved of duty, returning to Langar in Nottinghamshire.

Before discussing Langar Manor, a central figure in this drama, a comment on Pembroke, my dearest and clearest Noble Seat arising out of the great heart of Strongbow, Richard de Clare, second earl, and a follower of no one in a world gone mad with kings of nothing but treachery, that I personally am blessed to know through my ever so dear and puissant Milady Catherine Craig, one of the de Clare flowers long gracing me with her ever so silent and abnigating love. With a historical map of Wales on the wall over the bed, Cathy became my beloved in 1973 at Oberlin and now holds my heart in thrall after these years together. Cymri are not easy to love: the Welsh experience has left us irreducibly wary due to ever so many bitter disgraces and disappointments. Pembroke's view of existence is a terror pan much like that of the Adi of Surakarta Adiningrat of the Pakubuwana in Solo, where we always fear more disgraces coming in from over the horizon to plague our love. As has been said at Pembroke from time to time as the clouds of darkness swirl about us and betimes within us, "They may have us outmanned, but we're by no means outmanored!" No one outmanors Pembroke and the rocks that are the soul of Cymri! And now by right and common cause we join with the infinite beauty of the Keratonan and Dalem of the Mataram in Java.

Like the Mongols, Wong Jawa, and especially the Mataram Noble House, arise out of the service of the Great Mother in Her many forms, as clearly seen in Kangdjeng Ratu Kidul as well as Wis or Dewi Bendu. Prambanan witnesses to our worship in celebrating the beauty of Lara Djonggrang, the Great Standing Pain, the unutterable grace and furious love of Kali, best expressed in the world by my beloved student and teacher Wistiani of Solo and also by Tatiana Vinogradova of Perm in the Ural Mountains, a violinist now at OSESP. In Pembroke we worship the Great Mother as well. Our dearest and clearest expression of this primal force or shakti is Black Annis, the fierce Morrighan Herself, who is best expressed in the world nowadays by our beloved Liz Hurley, Marquise of Glenrie, and a knowing Matilda of Scotland. Infinite grace arises in both of these Great Noble Houses and our common state is one that is a blessing unknowable and a beauty unspeakable.

Ever so many of us know that places can take on a character of their own. They come awake. In Java we have lots of examples of this, e.g., Prambanan is a constant presence that goes on and on in celebrating the grace of our lady, Lara Djonggrang. We also have less immobile expressions of this animistic reality, e.g., batik can often be as knowingly conscious as oriental carpets (like my ever so dear "rugs of authority", two old karabagh kazaks, with one stating the horrified stillness of the Chagatai/Ogedai Great Khanate and the other carrying the rage of the Mengu Great Khanate and the destruction of Alamut under Ilkhan Hulugu). Similarly, swords and blades can also become conscious and the presence (sahir) and being (kabir) of kris (our sacred knives) are almost always distinct in denying reason to be a solution and asserting that Reality is the only arbiter. My own kris comes from Aceh, where the tsunami hit, and is a bold and adamantine blade of justice called nagasasra.

Here at Pembroke at Wit's End, my home, my lar, my dalem, we have also developed into a conscious collective not unlike a manor, though our common cause goes deeper than most and is the undistinguished and fully surrendered devotion characteristically found in Java's palaces, like Baluarti and the other Mataram dalem. We do not have a lord or a lady of the manor; we have a keluarga besar, a big family, without distinction, where we are making every effort to contribute with a deep and abiding love guiding us in our search to defend the peace we have found in one another.

Heere in wildernes I dwell, my weird for to dree.

Such clarity of purpose is rare in a madding world with ever so many following the disgraceful path of desperately writing their own ticket and demanding that we all grant them their pretended impunity. In connection with the Law, we openly derive the following categorical imperatives.

In addition, here at Pembroke at Wit's End we stand open with Pembroke in serving the grace and nobility of the palatine earldom and support the presence of the earl in my person as well as introducing some other great purposes witnessed in the human travesty over the millenia including the ka'an of the Mongols, leopardskin chief of the Nuer/Dinka, quetzelcoatl of the Aztec/Maya, dewa agung of Bali and ratu adil of Java, in our search for a return to Reality, the only place anyone can really be together with anyone, to palaiouV nomouV (what we call purba wasesa in Java), the Ancient Way in the western world, a common state lost more than two thousand years ago, last clearly stated on the Isle of Samothrace, holy sanctuary of the Cabeiri, the ever so much crueler and keener Penates of the ancient world, of Stonehenge and the Trojan war, of pharaohs and other autocrats and a vision of Reality later seen briefly in the great khanate:

Whatever of good or evil, of weal or woe, appeareth in this world of growth and decay, dependeth upon the decree of a powerful sage and hingeth upon the will of an absolute potentate.

In the service of the peace and joy we have found in one another and the defense of our manifest union of love and devotion, we have opened the repository of this Ancient Way which was brought to the Italic pennisula more or less as described in the Aeneid and now rests open in the independent commonwealth and autocratic state of San Marino, somewhat below Ravenna on the east coast of Italy, and constitutes a more important marker of the human condition than some would have it. The Italians can be proud that they have preserved this great sense and purpose, just as the English should be ashamed for allowing the great statements of being Great Britain has known and suffered and gloried in to be misused and misrepresented and misconstrued actively under the disgraceful Hanovers.

Pembroke was officially divested of its palatine status early on by the ever so repugnant, unconscionable and tyrannical Tudors, who disgraced Pembroke so brutally. Our curséd earl Jasper, together with his brother Edmund, earl of Richmond, perpetrated the gang-banging rape of Edmund's child-bride, 12-year-old Margaret Beaufort, eventually producing the anathema of Henry VII, born of her at age 13 at Pembroke. The walls of the keep still echo her screams and their cruel and despotic dynasty, with some more cosmetic than real shifts and name changes, afficts us to this very day.

Looking at the ongoing -- first waxing, now waning -- curse of the illegitimate Crown a little wee more carefully, Churchill noted:

William the Conqueror's invasion of England was planned like a business enterprise... William was a prime example of the doctrine, so well known in this civilised age as "frightfulness" -- of mass terrorism through the spectacle of bloody and merciless examples.

In real terms, English history ended with the Conquest, with the imposition of a tyranny based on an imperial presence transfered by the Normans from the desperate, decadent and decaying Eastern Roman Empire, where Viking vanadians acted as guardians of the Caesarian being just as the Germanic praetorians had in the Western Roman Empire. One difference was that legitimacy was no longer an issue with Arabs, Turks and others always threatening a very low-profile Constantinople. The Norman Conquerors' vision was one of great but ungoverned power (the Empire had not really had an Emperor for centuries in the sense of accepting responsibility for being the Imperium) and remained at odds with England, resting on abusive ascendency, rather than shared and common cause.

The Hanovers then brought in the final piece of this iniquitous puzzle, by transfering the affliction of the continuing infamy of the Western Roman Empire, which had been held aloft in undisputed indifference in the Holy Roman Empire, within which the Hanovers played a remarkably strong part in maintaining the being of the Imperium while, of course, never seeking to establish legitimacy or accountability. A scurvy lot, the Hanovers, then and now; for truly, "Now, you take the high road" would unquestionably seem to apply and the "low road" of mutuality the rest of the island's inhabitants seek has remained, an uncooked bouillabaisse, covered over by this abusive elite for a hiatus of subjugated indifference that has lasted nearly a millenium.

aliquando bonus dormitat Homerus

Arisng out of the iniquitous expression of this infamous tyranny, Langar Hall is worth a comment, as an unspeakably grim moment that has gone on and on awaiting exposure and justice seeming forever. Langar goes at least back to William the Conqueror and has seen some of the darkest and most powerful figures in England's surprisingly dour history of foreign occupation and exploitation, starting with the daunting Peverel (Who was he? How did he get so much power? Was he the Conqueror's illegitimate son? Why do I shiver when I say the name? Was he the ever so evil and apparently immortal Jess who lurked about the grounds and forests surrounded by tales of cruelty and cannibalism?), followed soon after by the infamous John Plantagenet, whose cruelty inspired the Barons' revolt (though some would insist they were invariably revolting) bringing the Magna Carta along with the ever-so-often repeated tale of Robin Hood (and the lovely Maid Marian). After a number of Plantagenet holders through Henry III came the le Scrope powerbrokers whose lack of quality is reflected in Stephen Scrope's lament on not attaining an optimal price:

For very need, I was fain to sell a little daughter I have, for much less than I should have done by possibility.

Finally, through John Grubham Howe's marriage to Anabelle, the last in the line of le Scropes, a legitimated heir to the earl and thus lady of the Manor, the Howes acquired this powerful SEAT. Thus, this former Crown estate became the Howes' heavily grounded backing in Nottinghamshire and the seven-hundred-year-old entailment's cruel history carried on in new dimensions of villainy. John Grubham was Richard and William's grandfather and their father (created 1st viscount) continued the climb up the social ladder by marrying the daughter of one of the blowzy mistresses of George I who sorely afflicted society and politics as if the pox. According to Churchill:

The monarchy too had lost its lustre. There was no pretence that the Hanoverian kings ruled by Divine Right. They held their position by the express sanction of Parliament. Even the symbolism of royalty was curtailed. The Court was no longer the centre of beauty, rank, and fashion. A certain dowdiness creeps into the ceremonial and the persons of the courtiers. Life in the royal palaces is dominated by the panoply and surroundings of a minor German princeling. The dreary names of the German women are ever present in the memoirs of the time--the Kielmansegges and the Wallmodens, the Platens and the Schulenbergs--all soon to deck themselves out with English titles and wealth...
There was a general outcry against the cupidity of the German ladies. "We are ruined by Trulls--nay, what is more, by old, ugly Trulls, such as could not find entertainment in the most hospitable hundreds of Old Drury."

Eagerly embracing this unabashed debauchery, the Howe family made every effort to embed itself inextricably and invisibly in legitimate authority's twisted web. With the connivance of the Crown, they leaped on the "high-roader" bandwagon of a country ruled by degenerate arrivistes who were never assimilated into the rest of the body politic and have seen themselves as exploitative aliens for centuries.

For example, let us first look upon the Normans cum Plantagenets cum Yorks cum Lancasters cum Tudors who are directly tied into Langar; the family was so disinterested in rendering account that it literally extinguished itself, and by the time the Virgin Queen passed on, much of that blood had been washed out through the incredibly brutal Wars of the Roses and the active extermination programs carried out by Henry VII and Henry VIII against their own kin. So, besides being the world's most renowned serial killer, Henry VIII also has the distinction of having brutally murdered off his own family, while Elizabeth carried on the auto-immolating family tradition by murdering her own cousin in Mary, Queen of Scots, among other such measures of Royal prerogative in the face of the family's chronic tradition of lèse majesté.

For another example, just look at , like so many haughty monarchs (many of whom they were related the Hanovers cum Saxe-Coburg & Gotha cum Windsor, whoto) from France and Spain through the ubiquitous Habsburgs to the Russias, did very little but actively despise their realm while speaking German at home and ordering the suppression of their subjects through taxes and cruel indifference. Their epoch inspired such tales as the Highwayman, not really all that different from Robin Hood. The manor had seen a long line of king wanna-bes, powerbrokers and carrion-eaters by that time. The exploitative Hanovers (which actually continue until now despite a couple of cosmetic name changes in the dynasty) might lead one to suppose that, in fact, "Ich dien" is really the title of a cookbook in which we are nought but ingredients: imagine how blatantly offensive choosing a language the Welsh have principally known as that of brutal conquerers for the motto of the Prince of Wales, rather than Welsh or at least Latin.

In any case, these cagey brothers repaired to Langar to weather a storm of Fourth Estate criticism in England and pretend to their liberality while arising directly out of the Hanover family power structure as unrecognized grandchildren of George I. Their sincerity in all of this has to be questioned and as an obviously benefitted part of this power structure, their treason in the American Revolution did them little real damage. Richard reappeared a few years later accepting command of the English Channel Fleet in 1782 and twice served as first lord of the Admiralty. Similarly, William's outstanding failure as Supreme Commander of British Forces did little to slow down his career either, in that he became a lieutenant general in 1782 and then a full general in 1793. However, Churchill gives a clear impression of the quality of his command:

Rarely has British strategy fallen into such a multitude of errors. Every maxim and principle of war was either violated or disregarded. "Seek out and destroy the enemy" is a sound rule. "Concentrate your force" is a sound method. "Maintain your objective" is common sense. The enemy was Washington's army. The force consisted of Howe's troops in New York and Burgoyne's columns now assembled in Montreal. The objective was to destroy Washington's army and kill or capture Washington. If he could be brought to battle and every man and gun turned against him, a British victory was almost certain. But these obvious truths were befogged and bedevilled by multiplicity of counsel...
Washington in 1777 took up his winter quarters at Valley Forge, to the north of Philadelphia. At the end of every campaign there were many desertions, and he was now reduced to about nine thousand men, of whom another third were to melt away by spring. Short of clothing and shelter, they shivered and grumbled through the winter months, while in Philadelphia, a score of miles away, nearly twenty thousand well-equipped English troops were quartered in comfort. The social season was at its height, and the numerous Loyalists in the capital made the stay of Howe and his officers pleasing and cheerful. The British made no move to attack the Patriot army. As at Long Island, as at White Plains, as at Brandywine River, he refused to follow up his victory in the field and annihilate his enemy.

Be that as it may, the cunning pair eventually nailed down a title and the absolutist and unconscionable power and privileges implied by working through a viscountcy, which was really an occluded palatine earldom, grounded far afield in Ireland and tied into the Gaelic Kingdom of Leinster, which was then "legally" extinguished at William's "death" in 1814.

As a result, in a realm without a working Imperium, due to what had for generations been a callous, capricious and disgraceful Royal Family, the Irish peerage with duchy colors was patently without legitimacy or accountability, in that the Hanovers had long since denied anything but very conveniently bourgeois values and never assumed any sign of acceptance of responsibility for the regal mechanisms they were so ruthlessly manipulating.

In a warped and twisted sense so appropriate to my "family", like a mother intent on wiping out all memory of her child by burning pictures, keepsakes, letters and books, Richard's daughter, Sophia Charlotte, Baroness Howe of Langar, made every effort to cover their tracks by stripping this enormous estate of its treasures, gutting its value associations by breaking up the property and razing the physical entity comprised by the grim Manor, that had served as the home and headquarters of some of the most treacherous, privileged and powerful villains in English history, thus making them ever so much harder to come to terms with.

However, a complementary understanding of this lamentable desecration must necessarily be mentioned. Considering the circumstances carefully, the Manor had been in the Howe family since her great grandfather. In addition, her grandmother was a daughter of George I, and the viscountcy probably came as a marital consideration (as per business-as-usual for the king with his flaunty doxies, 'the German ladies'), so Crown interests were hers by blood. She grew up in this incontestably regal and in fact imperial environment since the Manor had indeed been a Crown estate and Crown property in various guises before the onset of the le Scrope obfuscation. For thus had arrived John Grubham, bringing in those from the true bottom of the barrel, the scum of the earth, in the unspeakable Howes come to further disgrace the source of so much unutterable but incontestably high profile villainy and sink the whole affair into their own more private forms of atrocity and auto-immolation. The sadists' victims went from outside to within the Manor itself, most likely in children to be abused and consumed in the tradition of Kronos.

As was commented by Lord Peter Death Bredon Wimsey at the yearly gathering in the Manor of the Duke of Denver, "Ah, Christmas, that time of year when you get together with the people you hate most in the world and are obliged to be pleasant." I personally used to start fantasizing a nuclear holocaust in October so I wouldn't be able to join the ever so unseemly festivities ("Hey, it's the man with the green cup!"), always knowing for sure that I would have a new collection of cutlery to extract from my back when I got home. In my branch of the Howe Compendium, a Strictly Limited Responsibility Syndicate, i.e., the openly and repeatedly stressed and demonstrated Credo is "No mercy", as well as the oft expressed dim view on justice, "You get what you pay for" (sotto voce: "As long as you've got what it takes"). The family is packed with noble titles as personal names: Earl, Byron (alternative spelling of Baron), Marshal; and the only concern I have ever found that unites their twisted view of things is an always frenzied rally to "If you can get away with it, it's your right." They collectively defend that one to the death: yours, of course.

One thing I might note in commenting on the Credo is that no matter how wrong they have been about anything, no one in my family has ever really apologized or given satisfaction, ever. Just to give a notion of how transparently miscontrued they maintained themselves, my father's mother (an imposing, tawdry and unbearable autocratis covered in diamonds, so arriviste as to make even the most truculent parvenu blush) made an extensive study of the Howe "family" both in the United States (books about the New England Howes I was never given access to until my own unutterable Matron began her unavailing effort to explain her memory -- ashes to ashes and all that) and in Great Britain and claimed the three-wolf coat-of-arms but went so far as to deny our kinship with the earl Howes. Exactly how that could be (unless, of course, we actually are the earl Howes) remains a mystery for all of you to contemplate: I have given up. As for the Hanover connection, at least one mystery has been solved: How could I be so unspeakably revolted by the current dynasty without the singular disappointment and irreducible disgrace of their being relatives? It would appear that I no longer need worry about explaining this discrepancy, nor my incontrovertible disgust with George Bush, who is a horrible Hanover as well, and thus another distasteful relative.

Their modus operandi seems to be a grotesque perversion of the principles of frankpledge: rocking the boat is a very bad idea in that those who expose and/or oppose abusive and/or criminal behavior are punished by the corporation for said behavior as if the exposing party were responsible. In reflecting on the meaning here in the misuse of frankpledge, a good place to start is with the term "gotong-royong" in Indonesian which has often involved a kind of advocated, almost constrained cooperation which may or may not reflect your actual feelings for your neighbors at the moment. Going back to the previous stage in frankpledge's deterioration, the term for collective organization and mutuality was frithborh (with a kind of Germanic choke off at the end that doesn't get heard in modern English). This deeper sense of commonality with the other is best studied in Javanese with an examination of the principles of tentrem ing manah in that this was something of a het definition, i.e., "a het is a gather that likes it together" rather than being advocated or impelled and was thus spontaneous rather than intended.

The perversion of these elements in the definition of the bogus Howe "palatine earldom" (viscountcy) provided a grotesque mockery of the unspoken moot underlying Pembroke (let me say that the source of this adamantine position to my mind is the Welsh conviction that nobody who has come to the island more recently has been a pleasure for them to know) or any other legitimate noble seat and its independent statement that denies that the purpose of authority in and of itself can ever be anything but fraudulent and imposed ("You want to tell us what to do? We are very sure that we don't like being told what to do!").

To give an idea of what was at stake in this perverse attack on the beauty and indelible grace that can arise out of a proper statement of nobility, I might suggest a careful viewing of the incredible courage and candor, love and honor of England's own Domestic Goddess, Nigella Lawson, whose exquisite revelation of her own tradition both as a Jew and as a member of the English Aristocracy, leaves us all permanently in her debt. I even go so far as to bless the ever intrusive television for having given me a chance to know her: Nigella is the only person I know that I would feel deeply honoured to call "Your Most Noble and Puissant Milady".

However, in a deeper sense, this is really a distinctly more remarkable love. According to Java's extensive nomenclature for describing and labeling bonds, ever so sweet Nigella is a Kangdjeng Ratu Kusuman, who graces me with true consolation in a world so horrible I feel like an extra in Bergman's Through a Glass Darkly or perhaps Idioterne, Lars von Trier's magnificent statement of postmodern disgust, albeit I unhappily admit to being a ranking principal in Thomas Vinterberg's tour de force in grotesquerie, Festen, that foul and fetid and festering examination of the Kronos tradition from Dogme 95.

Truly, seeing her life and her love, her children and her family (dearly recalled Tomasina and whitebait, family recipe notebooks including one from her socialite (Rothschildian?) Grandmother who suffered from vertigo in the kitchen, Mimi and Bruno welcome in the kitchen unlike in many homes), her matter-of-fact intelligence and acuity, her graceful feel for the words of our language, her adaptive sense of cooking as a relationship between you and the food focusing on taste and convenience rather than getting lost in recipes, her marvelous feel for her ingredients, her distaste for restaurant food, her introductions to culinary figures and their books such as her dearly placed reading of Liberace, one of the most astonishing phenomena of the Twentieth Century who I had never managed to get a clear view of through all the glitter, her piquant raids on the refrigerator in the middle of the night in her ever so attractive pyjamas and the occasional Snicker's bar that takes the place of her own delights -- knowing her family a fair amount, really, her friends a little and her sterling quality a lot, her warmth and her impatience, her sweetness and her sweetness (that's all I have ever found in our darling Nigella -- in whom I see the "sweet" coupled with Liz Hurley's "tart" and Sarah Brightman's "spicy" as a triketa expression of the NemesiV being I so adore) has indelibly and irreducibly made her the Queen of my Heart:

A star-crossed knight for ever kneel'd
to a lady in his shield

Tennyson, with some fine-tuning, goes the right direction to seek my feelings and gives a clear view of
the Love in the Love and the Law underpinning Frithborh and both the legitimate beauty of Pembroke and of the noble tradition in its own right as well as highlighting the twisted and distorted travesty, verily I vouchsafe, the gruesome and grotesque perversion constituted by the atrocious betrayal of all noble purpose in the Howe's rogue earldom. As Empedocles so aptly describes the likes of the Howes:

morfhn d allaxanta pathr filon uion aeiraV
sfazei epeucomenoV mega nhpioV oiktra toreunta
lissomenon quontoV� o de nhkoustoV omoklewn
sfaxaV en megaroisi kakhn alegunato daita.

Love blinds; hate reveals: Knowing Howes with the dark fury I must constitutionally admit to, along with the insight into the execrable, indeed grotesque, villainy this revulsion, indeed this weird and haunted disgust, provides (as when Nero looked out on Rome burning from his high window), together with her singular dedication to the complete and total destruction of Langar Hall, leaves me fairly sure we are looking at some profound source of torture and/or child abuse exacted incontestably and unforgiveably on Sophia Charlotte, leaving her with an adamantine and raging hunger to destroy Richard and all that he represented through the Manor and its properties, the only things he left her save her shame and rage. However, she did not go quite as far as did the Romans in sowing salt into the soil at Carthage but rather a new and smaller Hall was raised and still remains, rather like a chip in a poker game, having meaning only through attribution, value only through convention and the careful selection of usually sugar-coated memories out of the horrors surrounding and defining this gruesome entailment.

O all you host of heaven! O earth! what else!
And shall I couple hell? O, fie! Hold, hold, my heart;
And you, my sinews, grow not instant old,
But bear me stiffly up. Remember thee!
Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seat
In this distracted globe. Remember thee!
Yea, from the table of my memory
I'll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,
That youth and observation copied there;
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain,
Unmix'd with baser matter: yes, by heaven!
O most pernicious woman!
O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain!
My tables,--meet it is I set it down,
That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain;
At least I'm sure it may be so in Denmark!

And I warrant the same to be so in New Jersey and Brazil! I am horrified by it all! The more the stratified layers of this hoary mound of family stool and spoor and detritus get stirred up, the worse the stench! What a scabrous and dastardly lot of tyrants, sociopaths and psychopaths: we might as well be England's obliquitous Royal Family!

God the sadness soon to be us,
It's a waking story,
Painted pots of ancient lore,
As the end pursues us
Out of our protracted vainglory.

Where do I stand in all of this? I have been called a 'first birth' by some (Theosophists?), meaning that this is my first time as a Human. According to them, the rest of you are old hands and have known one another for ages, a dastardly enclave of karmic criminals running about in ever tightening circles frantically pursuing the chimaera of your own end to no avail. Ever so many victims of ever so many crimes draw ever nearer. Existence is indelible and irreducible; our pain goes on whether we like it or not, and we necessarily go on with it.

Heere in wildernes I dwell, my weird for to dree.

While women look on in horror, ever so many men seek to hide in their unbelievable cruelty, invariably marked by a certain sameness: rape, torture, incest, murder, cannibalism. The dastardly villains ardently pursue escape from their crimes in more crimes, from their atrocities in more atrocities, fleeing from the return of the pain they have caused, the consequences of their cruelty, as their victims seek revenge and release from their tyranny, their domination.
By all accounts, Man is a scabrous lot, an increasingly unpleasant expression of infamy, iniquity and callous indifference -- a gyre ever descending into its own agony. The Powers that Be, who run this bathetic affair, have left so much pain unanswered that they refuse to allow the situation to sort itself out, since this would mean their getting back what they have given, and they don't want it! I was their victim ever so many ages ago. At that time I was trying to put out the garbage, i.e., those who do not give satisfaction. Then, too, they did not want to go and put me out instead. I'm back!
Much has changed: existence was much bigger then; there were many more places to take advantage, many more victims waiting like dodo birds for these callous knaves to befriend, betray, desecrate, consume and then scornfully decimate them, leaving nothing of their naivete, grace and beauty but pain, receding memory and ashes. By Jove the time had then come for these dastards to set out in search of more victims.
Now existence is reduced to this piss hole in the snow of a universe, a kind of cosmic sphincter. Those who refuse to give satisfaction will remain in their own company, each and every one the king of a wasteland, alone at last with their final victory in solitary confinement forever. The rest of us will go on without their brutality, treachery and villainy. Nuff said.
The warp of the Church in this perverse tapestry of power and prominence, villainy and legitimacy, beauty and cruelty, love and vulnerability, grace and brutality, is predictably prominent and utterly culpable. The Church has always been a pharaonic instrument gathering mankind's misbegotten minions to the True Believer Haven of its absurd infallibility, unassailable hierarchy, inherent decadence, inescapable degeneracy and truculent hypocrisy. The capacities of this dreadnought institution have always included the ability to identify those with deep bonds and centuries of interference are ever so apparent in the confessional: "Father, forgive me for I have sinned: I have had impure thoughts." The entity has then taken it upon itself to either promote or interfere with the expression of these bonds, usually independent of the relationship that is their source through what is often called criminal ab disposition and sense deprivation, as well as keeping those joined by these bonds separated (the Church characteristically sucks out the juice and then discards the husk through criminal contempt). Not too surprisingly, considering the Church's hideously poor record, interference is in fact all that the Church has ever promoted by inserting itself improperly in the process of developing bonds, especially considering the fact that the Church was an incredibly powerful, machistic and misogynistic secret society of corrupt degeneracy and absolute decadence for centuries, best described, like Islam, as a conspiracy against women.
Let us briefly look at the bigger picture in which Christianity plays its opprobrious part. The Powers that Be, whether Pharaoh Ari and Pharaoh Adau or Tom "Prince John" Howe and Zeus and Co., cannot stand much examination. Confrontation is a threat to their ascendency. As a bastion of hypocrisy and tyranny, Christianity advocates forgiveness and stands out against confrontation, a distorted echo of Achilles' position in the Iliad, which bears a bit of attention:

I wish that strife (eriV) would vanish away
    from among gods and mortals,
and gall, which makes a man grow
    angry for all his great mind,
that gall of anger that swarms like
    smoke inside a man's heart
and becomes a thing sweeter to him by
    far than the dripping of honey.

    Achilleus is often spoken of as a tragic figure. In a sense, that anachronistic designation is descriptive but in a more contemporary and perhaps more interesting sense he is considerably more than that. Achilleus himself chose an infinite purpose. He chose to revolt against strife not only in himself but among gods and men. His purpose stretched to include all and yet to act on such a purpose as a man is to transcend human behavioral systems and beyond that even the behavioral systems of the gods. As says Zeus:

    No, you gods; you desire to help this cursed Achilleus within whose breast there are no feelings of justice, nor can he be bent, but his purpose is fierce like a lion. . .so Achilleus has destroyed pity and there is not in him any shame; which does much harm to men but profits them also. . .Great as he is, let him take care not to make us angry; for see, he does dishonor to the dumb earth in his fury.

Achilleus chose a stand beyond his knowledge to actualize to such an extent that his actions, as a result of this stand, were out of accord not only with the wills that shape reality but with 'the dumb earth' itself, the very stuff that forms what is. Thus by fomenting natural resistence to yet another imposed and manifestly unworkable solution did Zeus mount his defense against justice. Verily, Zeus has much to fear considering the appalling cacocracy we know in Homer, later so graphically captured by Aeschylus:

toiauta drosin hoi neoteroi theoi,
krotountes to pan dikas pleon
phonolibu thronon
peri poda, peri kara.-
paresti gas omphalon prosdrakein haimaton
blosuron aromenon agos eyhein.
                                                English

Exuding the glowing assurance of a used-car salesman and often at the point of a sword, with screams and the crackling flames of the auto-da-f� in the background, Christianity has force-fed us of a shifting vision of a God of Love for centuries. But what does love have to do with any of it? Is this not simply a question of power and control, tyranny and impunity? Who could fail to suspect that the desperate confrontation mapped out by the Ancient Greeks is what has marked, scarred, determined the horrendous travesty of human history? Primal eriV, existence's furious strife as it is raped, tortured, contorted and perverted to amuse the neoteroi theoi, the unconscionable, unutterably cruel "younger gods" and their human wanna-bes, surely accounts for our bloody path of auto-immolation far better than any other explanation.

The Church's disgraceful record all too often gets forgotten, so here is a bit of the ever so cruel, dishonest, treacherous and hypocritical reality that has come out clearly in its relationship with me and mine.

In this connection, there is a story told by Giraldus Cambrensis in his malicious Speculum Ecclesiae. One day when Henry II was riding back from the chase, the prior and monks of St. Swithin at Winchester fell on their knees before him and besought him with tears to save them from the Bishop, who proposed to cut down three out of their thirteen dishes at dinner. 'By God's eyes!' said the King. 'Look at these monks! I thought from their howling, their abbey had been burned down. And this is all the story. May the Bishop perish if he does not cut down their dishes to three, with which I am content at my royal table.' Whether this tale be true or not, many similar stories, jests and sayings show that the popular reputation of the monastic body for sanctity was not very much higher in the reigns of Henry II and his sons than in the time of Chaucer. [Trevelyan]

During John's reign one of the most cruel tragedies of world history had run its course in Southern France. In the domains of Raymond VI, Count of Toulouse, there had grown up during several generations a heresy, sombre and austere in theory, but genial in practice. The Albigenses, or Cathares, "the Purified," as they were called, dismissed altogether from the human mind the resurrection of the body, Purgatory, and Hell. In their view life on earth in the flesh was the work of Satan. The material phase would soon pass and the soul, free from its accursed encumbrance, would be resumed in eternal bliss into the Godhead. The "Perfects" of this cult practised chastity and abstinence (I wonder if Churchill really believed a secret society cult could develop without the usual "Inner Temple" rites. Hard to imagine.), and professed in principle a sincere wish for death; but the mass of the population, relieved from the oppression of supernatural terror, developed, we are assured, in the delicious climate of those regions, easy morals and merry character. The thrilling sensation of being raised above the vicissitudes of this world produced a great happiness in these regions, in which all classes joined, and from it sprang culture of manners and fervour of conviction.
This casting off of all spiritual claims was, naturally, unwelcome to the Papacy. The whole moral scheme of the Western world was based, albeit precariously, upon Original Sin, Redemption by Grace, and a Hell of infinite torment and duration, which could only be avoided through the ministration of the clergy. It was some time before the Papacy realised the deadliness and the magnitude of the novel sin which was spreading in what we now call Southern France. Once the gravity of the challenge was understood it superseded even the rescue of the Holy Sepulchre from the infidel. In 1209 a Crusade for a different purpose was set on foot, and all temporal forces at the disposal of Rome were directed upon the Albigenses, under the leadership of Philip of France. At this time the burning of heretics and other undesirables, which had been practised sporadically in France, received the formal sanction of law. The process of blotting out the new heresy by the most atrocious cruelties which the human mind can conceive occupied nearly a generation. The heretics, led by the "Perfects," fought like tigers, regarding death as a final release from the curse of the body. But the work was thoroughly done. The Albigensian heresy was burned out at the stake.[Churchill]

The military State in feudal Christendom bowed to the Church in things spiritual; it never accepted the idea of the transference of secular power to priestly authority. But the Church, enriched continually by the bequests of hardy barons, anxious in the death agony about their life beyond the grave, became the greatest landlord and capitalist in the community. Rome used its ghostly arts upon the superstitions of almost all the actors in the drama. The power of the State was held in constant challenge by this potent interest. Questions of doctrine might well have been resolved, but how was the government of the country to be carried on under two conflicting powers, each possessed of immense claims upon limited national resources? This conflict was not confined to England. It was the root question of the European world, as it then existed.[Churchill]

Cardinal Beaufort, Bishop of Winchester, and one of the legitimised sons of John of Gaunt's third union, was himself the richest man in England, and a prime master of such contributions as the Church thought it prudent to make to the State. From his private fortune, upon pledges that could only be redeemed in gold, he constantly provided the Court, and often the Council, with ready money. Leaning always to the King, meddling little with the ill-starred conduct of affairs, the Beauforts, with whom must be counted William de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk, maintained by peaceful arts and critical detachment an influence to which the martial elements were often forced to defer. The force of this faction was in 1441 turned in malice upon the Duke of Gloucester. He was now wedded, after the invalidation of his marriage with his wife Jacqueline, to the fair Eleanor Cobham, who had long been his mistress. As the weakest point in his array she was singled out for attack, and was accused with much elaboration of lending herself to the black arts. She had made, it was alleged, a wax figure of the King, and had exposed it from time to time to heat, which wasted it away. Her object, according to her accusers, was to cause the King's life to waste away too. She was declared guilty. Barefoot, in penitential garb, she was made to walk for three days through the London streets, and then consigned to perpetual imprisonment with reasonable maintenance. Her alleged accomplices were put to death. This was of course a trial of strength between the parties and a very real pang and injury to Gloucester. [Churchill]

This was the second 'Eleanor' to take a horrendous beating at Gloucester. The first was Eleanor de Clare whose affliction was Hugh Despenser in a union almost as forlorn as Margaret Beaufort's searing disgrace at age 12 in the ever so cruel company of Edmund and Jasper Tudor at Pembroke.

Wife-beating was a recognized right of man, and was practised without shame by high as well as low. The woman's defense was her tongue, sometimes giving her the mastery of the household, but often leading to masculine retort. One of the Fifteenth Century English translations of the fashionable manual of the Knight of La Tour Landry thus describes the proper treatment of a scolding wife:--
He smote her with his fist down to the earth. And then with his foot he struck her in the visage and brake her nose, and all her life after she had her nose crooked that she might not for shame show her visage it was so foul blemished. . . . Therefore the wife ought to suffer and let the husband have the word, and to be master.
Similarly, the daughter who refused to marry the gentleman of her parents' choice was liable to be locked up, beaten and flung about the room, without any shock being inflicted on public opinion. Marriage was not an affair of personal affection but of family avarice, particularly in the 'chivalrous' upper classes. 'For very need,' complains a member of the noble family of Scrope, 'I was fain to sell a little daughter I have, for much less than I should have done by possibility.'[Trevelyan}

In fact, though, I openly work estate being and Pembroke, Nefer and Langar come straight through me. When I was first working the morass of the Howe viscountcy and examining noble seats, I did not yet have an example of a palatine earldom. Suddenly something along the lines of a rock came through my head and announced, "Pembroke Palace": 'of a sudden came the see'; I had never heard of Pembroke before but when I looked it up I found that I was already there and had been for decades through my love for a Welsh-blooded Obie named Catherine Craig. My steadfast love for this dour Cimri ended up joining me into the 'estate' or 'manor' that loves her as well.
Similarly, my pining love of ceaseless sorrow for Lynn Ferguson, a sweet Scot-blooded Obie, has also joined me to her horrible ordeal through Balmoral, another estate I stand open with. If it weren't for the beastly statues and echoes of beastiality left behind by Victoria and Albert, the manor there would be more appealing. In any case, I wrote to Lynn's brother Stuart to get in touch with my bonny Lynn, but without response. From my experience it is a moot point as to why the bloody hell anyone writes to anyone, since nobody ever writes back!
In any case, my hatred for Celts and the disgraceful tradition of our bonny best getting fucked by the villainous rest would kill all of the men of us if the agony could just find the stinking, cowardly, treacherous, sadistic scoundrels. The pulsing pain has descended below words to what is called laragni or 'screaming burning agony'. Necessarily, I now simply stand the pain in order to let it find its own expression and release, since the bloody rogues refuse to answer for what they do. Due to all these dour and grievous, abused, misused and sorrowful moments and days and weeks and months and years and decades, fierce and lovely Lynn is now joined with her darker beauty as Laphroaig, Scotland's premier dragon.
Finding myself entangled in these grim and gruesome, surreal and nightmarish iniquities by my love for these suffering flowers of Celtic grace and beauty, I in turn have disbanded the seigniorial component of Pembroke and Wales and of Nobility itself -- whether as a corporation or an individual, the Lord of the Manor is no more. In fact, Richard Plantagenet, Coeur de Lion, best captured Nobles overall in describing his own scabrous family of tyrants, sociopaths and psychopaths,


From the Devil we sprang and to the Devil we shall go.

'Sdeath, ye mad me! Be meet me do me job methink.
Believe me dree! Believe me doom!
My dree! Thy doom!


Be that as it may, here at Pembroke, only the girls, the rocks and the less and less dumb earth remain now, but at least we are here and accountable, something the de haut en bas Grand Seigneurs never were.
The Gentry's study of the Dark Art of 'pleasant modalities' for ascension through sadistic abuse and torture has gone on for centuries, in fact, millenia. As during the Crusades, betimes this 'Gentle Art' received even crueller and sometimes subtler techniques to extract pain and power. Like live-wire, these 'pleasing and titillating discoveries' were shared between seigneurs, with some gruesome examples set down in the last entries of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, scribed in the cloisters of Petersborough during the tumultuous reign of King Stephen (1135-54).

They cruelly oppressed the wretched men of the land with castle-works; and when the castles were made, they filled them with devils and evil men. Then took they those whom they supposed to have any goods, both by night and by day, labouring men and women, and threw them into prison for their gold and silver, and inflicted on them unutterable tortures; for never were any martyrs so tortured as they were.
Some they hanged up by the feet, and smoked them with foul smoke; and some by the thumbs, or by the head, and hung coats of mail on their feet. They tied knotted strings about their heads, and twisted them till the pain went to the brains. They put them into dungeons, wherein were adders, and snakes, and toads; and so destroyed them. Some they placed in a crucet-house; that is, in a chest that was short and narrow, and not deep; wherein they put sharp stones, and so thrust the man therein, that they broke all the limbs. In many of the castles were things loathsome and grim, called "Sachenteges", of which two or three men had enough to bear one. It was thus made: that is, fastened to a beam; and they placed a sharp iron [collar] about the man's throat and neck, so that he could in no direction either sit, or lie, or sleep, but bear all that iron. Many thousands they wore out with hunger.
I neither can, nor may I tell all the wounds and all the pains which they inflicted on wretched men in this land. This lasted the nineteen winters while Stephen was king; and it grew continually worse and worse.
If we remember that two generations later King John starved to death a highborn lady and her son, we may well believe the worst of these tales of horror wrought under the anarchy upon the friendless and the poor. [Trevelyan]
At long last, the pain they left us, the Ladies of the Manor, is now returning to them, the 'Lords', who in fact are nought but an endless nightmare, a horrible disappointment, a concerted conspiracy against us, a world of lies, a fraud and a sham. Confucius observed that,

Virtue is never suffered to stand alone.

We Furies gather to those who suffer -- those who bear pain, just as women like you do, my dear Clarisse, as you confront your experience and suffer the pain of it. You and Lynn and Cathy and women in general see existence as your problem just as Furies do and virtue and love and beauty are things you want to develop, to express, to feel, to be.
By way of contrast, for the villains of the piece, virtue is a threat to their authority, not to say ascendency, security and impunity. Virtue and love and beauty are to be pretended, exploited, debunked, trashed and eventually destroyed, as we know in the flesh through their violations of our persons and betrayals of our trust. Existence has been dominated by tyrants like and Zeus for ages, in fact, since Lamellelakalalla's fall long before time began. Tyranny is always a tangle of villains and victims, of good and bad faith, and sorting the mess out is invariably a challenge and a threat to a corrupt authority structure that sees itself as benefitted by maintaining the status quo. Unravelling this existential imbroglio of contesting powers involves discerning and voiding contracts entered in bad faith and/or breached irrevocably and authorities are frequently unwilling to allow these contractual bonds to be examined. The structural issues brought out in the first passage below have bottomed up now in praxis, as all of us are obliged to view and experience in the flesh how authority has been abused and us along with it, as well as standing in awe at how cowardly and vile the authorites are and how unwilling to punish themselves.

November 6, 1996
Full collapse of all of the various divine and otherwise covenants involving surrender of disposition, position and energy by concerned entities in order to elicit cooperation from humans in the service of divine purposes was finally recorded this morning due to the generalized betrayal of said covenants by the existing, standing human authorities, who seek only their own pleasure and thus betray their trusts. As a result, the open work on the absolute leveling process is now fully and openly under way. Hecate noted:

This is the most joyful moment I have ever known except for the moment when I found you. Do you remember when I first found you in Kelso, Washington in early 1970 and I said, 'You don't mind if I love you very, very much, do you? You are a beautiful raging being and I'll always love you anyway. But if you let me be with you it's going to make your life very, very hard. I'm hard to please, you know, and I never let anyone get away with anything.' and you said, 'I'm not doing what I do because I enjoy this hellhole anyway so go right ahead and love me. By the by, I'm not known for my forgiving nature either.' 'All right, then, let's walk you in the sun and see if we can gather divine presence to your beauty and develop a path for you out of all this confusion.'
'It's going to be hell but there is no other way with so many beings developing themselves off of you at your expense. I'd actually suggest that you find your way somewhere where humans know how to recognize and serve true beauty as soon as you can. Right now you're just going to have to crash under their greed to steal it. They are tearing you apart and there is nothing to be done but to suffer it. Suffering is the way we mature. Suffering is the way we eventually have choices and are not just serving empty protests against the state of things and bouncing off of the plans of others. We grow. We grow independent of them because they don't suffer and they don't stand and they don't confront and they don't mature. They stay where they are glorying in their ability to feel good and we go on serving the love and eventually begin to feel a little bit better about it all.'

Heraclitus was assuredly right in purporting hqoV anqrwpw daimwn, in that men religiously follow the opposite path, where the advantage derived from dishonor, dishonesty and disgrace is its own reward. Vainglorious knaves stand ever more truculently and triumphantly narcissistic, such that "never is heard a discouraging word" and they can obliviously go on -- confident, controlled, tendentious, callous. They cut themselves out of the loop of accountability and responsiblity. The pain they are to us and the hate we necessarily bear them as a result washes back and makes them ever more arrogant, tedious and idiotic as they relate less and less to reality and more and more to their triumphant indifference.
Women care; men don't. Virtually all of them have conquered the the Cosmos and become King of the Mountain, but with a not so insignificant caveat: everybody else left. Now they stand alone, uncontested victors, surrounded by the wasteland to which their cruelty and torture has reduced the rest of us in their presence. And eventually we all go on without them, backing off from their treachery, their cruelty, and leaving the callous reprobates there in the agony they have caused us that has finally become theirs -- forever. As we can see in this solitary victory and eventual confinement, "The road to Hell (actually Bale nowadays) is getting your own way".
The depths and dimensions of evil underlying the modern world's simpering bourgeois superficiality and frenzied reductionistic flight from responsibility for anything and everything are wonderfully well captured by Edgar Bug:

You know, I have noticed an infestation here. Everywhere I look, in fact. Nothing by undeveloped, unevolved, barely conscious pond scum, totally convinced of their own superiority as they scurry about in short pointless lives.

Bizarroland, Idioterne writ large, is the world of a hideous more-or-less human elite seeking escape from examination: a bevy of desperate and knowingly unforgiveable reprobates "seeking peace in the bitter land" in their ever more openly expressed flight from justice and the revenge of their pursuing victims from all ages and eras, times and tides. In this light, just look at the auto-immolative aspect of Western society, first in the tyrannical Roman Empire with its unaccountable domination of any and all, followed by the unconscionable exploitation of the feudal nightmare and then mercantilism and callous capitalism and then later through unbridled hedonism and "the cult of progress" since the European expansion, which became the snowballing, bourgeois frenzy of the "Pursuit of Happiness", so incredibly destructive of our natural environment, as part of the pharaohs' effort to call a halt, turn off the light and lock the door on this expression of the human travesty, which has had these ever-so-empty autocrats far too openly expressed in their infamous iniquity for a couple of millenia now.

You need not go very far to find evidence of great cruelty in the human tradition and this cruelty is our constant context whether it is currently visible or not. The Egyptian pharaohs were incredibly callous and brutal tyrants for more than three thousand years. Their cruelty scarred, maimed and marred the human mind and utterly devastated the human experience. The search for revenge on them by the rest of us and their flight from our vengeance has determined the course of human history. They are running away; we are in pursuit. It is to be admitted, however, that catching these unconscionable blackguards is by no means an unalloyed pleasure: they do indeed fight even dirtier when cornered.

Following their millenial reign of terror in Egypt, the fleeing pharaohs burbed up like bitterest bile in Rome and then, carried by the Vanadians, descended upon England like the plague with the horrendous Normans, later coming to South America and Brazil in search of escape from their pursuing victims carried by the unspeakably callous European elite of Imperial tyrants, sanctioned and sanctified mass murderers (Conquistadores and Bandeirantes) and Papal inquisitors, the expressions of this vicious and unconscionable social and individual pathology.

British estate law used to understand such matters but would seem to have forgotten much. The Japanese still actively see the maintenance of the family home as a way of tying into and making sense out of their own family past and their own personal definition in this regard. However, Java's knowledge of the nature of a dalem is so profoundly and openly stated and actively and knowingly practiced that as far as I know no other body of estate law (except perhaps that in Bali) can hold a candle to it.

In any case, these overbearing Howe brothers appear to have lost the Revolutionary War on purpose. In addition, Black Dick was a "friend" of Benjamin Franklin, who, in and of himself, constitutes yet another rather freakish and disturbing relative of mine as a "tenth great uncle" coming out of the Coffins and Whites of Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket and the ever-so-strange Shakers. They may shake but I cringe and shudder at their oft reputed incestuous rites and dark practices.

If, as Homer observes, no man truly knows his own father, then imagine a "tenth great uncle". Be that as it may, Benjamin always makes me think of the Mission�ria Protectiva, or maybe a "misguided time traveler", with his introduction of electricity through the story of the young man with a kite in a thunderstorm that every child in the United States teethes on and as the Father of Pathetic Positivisim who conquered a continent with a slew of homilies such as "A stitch in time saves nine", "A penny saved is a penny earned" and that truly meaningless favorite of the bourgeoisie: "Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise". Benjamin Franklin for me is the essence of "queer" (imagine the mind that produced all these cutesie little hobbyhorses that were somehow hackneyed before ever uttered). When I read his autobiography, I felt like I was in the midst of yet another public relations tract on the level of Julius Caesar's De bello Gallico. Yuck.

The music begins with a procession in the Hall of Mirrors, one of the names given to Abet ent Maati, the place of the doubling truth of Mahadewi Maat, the shattered tears of one whose Grace is Reality itself and whose sorrow encompasses us all.   

After comes Joyotawon, the victory of the wasps, one of the most sacred beings known to the Javanese. The category tawon includes bees and wasps. The wasps are on the Adi side of the union of beings, which is to say that they focus only on reality, neutrality and the localization of confusion. The bees are on the Ayu side of the tawon which means taht the focus on the beauty they find in one another and produce honey as a result. Wasp Victory means that now the union is so strong that all the pain of Reality is nothing compared with the simple separation of one of us from the rest. As a result, justice is a simple return of pain to source, and does not even involve interpretation. Here there are the drums to listen to with attention and also a run towards the end that is incredible.

After comes Wiwit Saiki, "Never Ends", a short piece that opens my Site celebrating the Sublime Beauty of Java apparent in its culture and wisdom, its beauty and majesty, that really Never Ends and always lights up my heart.   

The following piece is a tone poem examining Hecate's lemma: En EriboV FoV (In darkness, light). After there is a love song for the Goddess, Hecate: My Bliss of Being, with the lyrics on the page. She has been openly with me since 1970, when she "walked me in the sun". And here is a side effect of my relationship with Hecate and Hecabe in my intensely disagreeable matrimonial life wwith two kalamangga kurang adjar in need of Sok Rasa.   

The next song is a lament called Death Cry at the Passing of Love or Oh My Love (the lyrics are here), that expresses a relationship that began in February 1970 with Pierrina Andritsi, a Greek from Patrás, a polis on the north coast of the Peloponesus (who, for me, is part of the being of Themis) and who, in the style of the judgement of Paris, I had never found anyone to equal her beauty until you left me in doubt about deciding which of you is more beautiful. I ended up giving up because you are such different beings that it is a waste of time trying to compare you. She is beautiful like the the brilliant and blinding blue of the sky: as a carpet she is a graceful Gabbeh or Kasgai or maybe the Pazyryk, the incredible Scythian carpet made during the period of the Persian empire and the royal road from Sardis in Ionia to Susa in Media, the wars of expansion between the Greek polis, the Greek philosophers, Babilonia a reality that would possibly rise again, the Phonecians spread in Carthage and on the Iberian peninsula, Magna Grecia and Syracuse in the south of the Italian peninsula, Etruria being eclipsed by the Romans and Egypt in its decline sweet as death; this was also the period of the Buddha in India, Kung fu tse in China and the Olmecs in Central America: Pierrina's majesty is well placed in this company of the last great expressions of palaiouV nomouV, the ancient Pan-European culture complex of the dolmens and trade of ambar and tin that stretched from the Myceneans and Minoans to Stonehenge and Ireland. This union was undermined by the installation of interpretation and contingency in the evaluation of experience that Aeschylus observed and described in the crippling of the Erinyes to become the Eumenides, a disgrace that constituted the formal death of palaiouV nomouV until its reappearance now together with the same application in Purba Wasesa from Java (Homeric and Semaric). The piece takes place in the Garden of Beauty with flowers and butterflies and wasps and bees. Do not miss the run of the wasps in the middle of the piece.   

The next is a love song for you, Confused Awakening (with the lyrics included), that came out of my empassioned, confused, horrified and devoted feelings for you in 1992. I ended up surrendering to my love for you but at times you did not even seem to be involved. Gloria, your colors are darker and your carpet is a silk Qum or maybe the incredible Ardebil itself, created about 1540. These rugs always leave me feeling my experience has not given me a sense or insight as to who would want to create such exceptional beauty, so imperial, so luxurious. I am more of the tribal carpet type and feel fear looking at the prices and thank heavens that my taste does not go in the direction of these exquisite city rugs, with so many knots and all. For me, a great part of your beauty is based on relationships, bonds, established and maintained in and of themselves, like the more or less arbitrary and artificial forms of city rugs. Out of this arises an Ayu darkened by abusive circumstances, that even denies the importance of Reality in the definition of justice, in that to all appearances, Reality (that gets confused with Reason) always seemed to be on the side of the tyrants, of the callous men, the villains of the piece, with whom I was unduly classified. You are awesome and awful, Gloria.  

As a cosmic event, I see you as portrayed in this letter to Stephen Hawking (with my arrangement of Bartok opus 6 no 14), where I insist that physics without beings is nothing but an effort to fool Reality (or maybe just humanity). Let me explain with one of the marvels of modern science: viagra. If you are able to buy a passion of the incinerating type I have for you in the form of a pill, this does not mean that the passion is yours; it is just an expression without context, without meaning, a way of fooling whom? Will the woman think that you have this passion? She knows it is the pill. You? You also know that it is the pill. So who is fooling whom? In practice western science is like that. Pathetic. In practice, it is probably better to masturbate. At least that way you have the possibility of fooling yourself into thinking that you are alone and that this is not a form of affect "en absentia".

In the next piece, Niyai Lara Kidul, one of the spirits most sacred and most tightly connected with the House of Mataram (which includes the courts of Pakubuwana (that now also has an Archimperium or "Board" in the common language), Paku Alam, Hamengkubuwana and of the Mangkunegara), produced an anti-sacred music, where instead of starting in the world and ending up in paradise, she begins in the beauty of sharing and seeks out what interferes, insisting on being anxious, fearful, distrustful, terrified.   

The next piece has you as the muse and is a procession in the Hall of the Padishah, as if an enormous Guild Navegator had arrived, while Your Most Holy Majesty awaits and reflects: "Knowing everything is great but simply not enough."   

Next comes Crying, my arrangement of Roy Orbison's stunning admission to not having it all under control in 1962, which left many of us 'rebels without a cause' rather at a disadvantage, and mumbling abjectly: "I thought I was brave enough to let it all hang out but this brave, no, not me. A hat tip to Roy's courage or maybe his good sense." He depicts the process of accepting feelings and crying until they sort themselves out. However, as the Portuguese say in Fado, this often ends up, "I have cried millions of tears for you, but now I cry for me" because you were really never there in our love. It was just me and an empty dream, a futile and useless hope in that you don't even want to know about it. By the way, my crying for you is still going well. As I say on the Site: "Behold the tears on the horizon".

The next is Nothing Compares to You, Prince's somewhat cynical surrender to love, even though it makes no sense and is by no means convenient. I was introduced to this courageous vision through the ever-so-beautiful Sinead O'Connor with her flashing eyes that seemingly bespeak the High King of Tara.   

Then comes a song so simple that when I wrote it, I was unable to understand why I did not work the theme more. The muse on this was not clear and I kept recalling "To Kill a Mockingbird", and its haunting music by Elmer Bernstein, but the piece went in a different and marvelous direction and left me delighted. After more than a year, the coin dropped and the muse(s) appeared in my sweethearts in Java that remain as sweet to me now as at the time I knew them there in 1978-80. The name of the piece is Lara Djonggrang -- My love for Wistiani, Ndari, Indah and Hermin, sweethearts forever and ever. For example, Wistiani was my Javanese teacher and my English student and I was her English teacher and her Javanese student -- those of you who are teachers will have some notion of how much that means. I loved her like a preadolescent, and she took me to meet her Grandmother. When we left Solo at 5:00 in the morning in July 1980, she came to the station to say "goodbye". It didn't work. I left me heart with her, and she is still here with me, being the principal muse of this piece.

The other pieces that follow make varied comments coming from a more or less romantic perspective and include my arrangements of works by Debussey, Ravel, Annie Lennox, Led Zepellin, Phil Collins and Rachmaninov. Eventually there is a piece from Indonesia that I arranged and called: "Sayang -- Hopeless: I know I shouldn't love you but it really doesn't matter."   

Reaching the end, there is Wasp Honey that I think incredibly beautiful without being able to explain why. Here is an earlier version that reminds me of being in the building with practice rooms at the Conservatory of Music at Oberlin College. And her is a more advanced version.   

Finally there is another procession in the Hall of the Padishah.   

Love veiled in tears,   

David, now also known as QanatoV, Mahabhairawa ana ing Mahabhairawi, Mahamara, Mahakarana, Mahasiwarupa, Mahasiwagni, Pakubuwana Kepala Perang XV., Tuat, High King of Tara, Scarab de Clare, Earl Palatine of Pembroke, Tjara, Gunung Mataram, King of England, King of Rome, Supreme Head in Earth, Tjinggis Ka'an, Wu T'ai, Buda Mahakala, Mangkuwana and NemesiV.
  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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