Emily Dickinson........of course! Why didn't I think of that? Could it be my evilness? Possibly.
Emily Dickinson must have known all about tight breathing men. Reveals her wimmin's nature.
Eeeeeeeee-vill.
That women are evil does not preclude them from a certain genius as regards the subject at hand...
A narrow Fellow in the Grass
Occasionally rides--
You may have met Him--
did you not
His notice sudden is--
The Grass divides as with a Comb--
A spotted shaft is seen--
And then it closes at your feet
And opens further on--
He likes a Boggy Acre
A Floor too cool for Corn--
Yet when a Boy, and Barefoot--
I more than once at Noon
Have passed, I thought, a Whip lash
Unbraiding in the Sun
When stooping to secure it
It wrinkled, and was gone--
Several of Nature's People
I know, and they know me--
I feel for them a transport
Of cordiality--
But never met this Fellow
Attended, or alone
Without a tighter breathing
And Zero at the Bone--* Emily Dickinson
translation:
Emily Dickinson was scared of snakes.
We already knew she was an hysteric......which, of course, is a developmental achievement. Romantics....what can you do with em?
Snakes...and this is one of the few things Genesis got right...are god-like, full to bursting with the most fundamental wisdom, and your downfall.
I just love falling down.
The ease...the comfort...the zest! with which you women fall towards the flames speaks with clear and resonant voice to your relationship with Evil. That is, you are drawn to it. Inevitability - is there anything more commonly denied?
You are drawn down inexorably...shall we speak honestly? is your gender capable of honesty?...to us. A source of evil you truly are, just as is the moon a source of light.
Snake
A snake came to my water-trough
On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,
To drink there.
In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob tree
I came down the steps with my pitcher
And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough before me.
He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom
And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over the
edge of the stone trough
And rested his throat upon the stone bottom,
And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness,
He sipped with his straight mouth,
Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body,
Silently.
Someone was before me at my water-trough,
And I, like a second-comer, waiting.
He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do,
And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do,
And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused a moment,
And stooped and drank a little more,
Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels of the earth
On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.
The voice of my education said to me
He must be killed,
For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold are venomous.
And voices in me said, If you were a man
You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off.
But must I confess how I liked him,
How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink at my water-trough
And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless,
Into the burning bowels of this earth?
Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him?
Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him?
Was it humility, to feel so honoured?
I felt so honoured.
And yet those voices:
If you were not afraid, you would kill him!
And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid,
But even so, honoured still more
That he should seek my hospitality
From out the dark door of the secret earth.
He drank enough
And lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has drunken,
And flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so black,
Seeming to lick his lips,
And looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air,
And slowly turned his head,
And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice adream,
Proceeded to draw his slow length curving round
And climb again the broken bank of my wall-face.
And as he put his head into that dreadful hole,
And as he slowly drew up, snake-easing his shoulders, and entered farther,
A sort of horror, a sort of protest against his withdrawing into
that horrid black hole,
Deliberately going into the blackness, and slowly drawing himself after,
Overcame me now his back was turned.
I looked round, I put down my pitcher,
I picked up a clumsy log
And threw it at the water-trough with a clatter.
I think it did not hit him,
But suddenly that part of him that was left behind convulsed in
undignified haste,
Writhed like lightning, and was gone
Into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front,
At which, in the intense still noon, I stared with fascination.
And immediately I regretted it.
I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!
I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education.
And I thought of the albatross,
And I wished he would come back, my snake.
For he seemed to me again like a king,
Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,
Now due to be crowned again.
And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords
Of life.
And I have something to expiate:
A pettiness.
-- D. H. Lawrence
D.H. Lawrence was soooo gay, in the real sense of the phrase, not the denigrating one. What would he know of wimmins and their evilness? He clearly loves the ole snake there...now, speaking of snakes and falling down, this one is for the bunny:
Singing the Snake
(A poem of Ayers Rock)
Old Tjupurrula squeezes my arm
and puckers his lips, pointing -
Pintupi-style - toward the television set;
eyes fastened on the screen,
on dissolves of that sandstone monolith:
a montage of Uluru awash with rain;
water cascading, crashing down -
blackening the Rock
Leaning close, he whispers:
"The rainbow -
the rainbow comes from the earth
and returns to the earth."
It is a snake, he says,
a giant snake
with a long beard and sharp teeth.
It lives in caves under the rockhole
at the top of Uluru.
"It has no need of men or women.
No Dreamings, no ceremonies,"
he says.
It was here before Creation Times,
and has never changed its form.
"Proper cheeky one, Snake,
very dangerous;
when it is angry, the land is dry.
People drink sand."
No one is happy for it;
no one is sad for it.
It has no need of custodians
("Kurtangulu, nothing.")
It is like that other one -
the serpent in the Garden.
It turns knowledge into fear,
and fear into knowledge.
But, with the right fear
you can protect yourself.
Be mindful of the Snake.
Take time to look, look again -
feel the land through your feet;
the Snake will not harm those
who show the proper respect.
Those who rush in must be strangers.
"It will attack strangers."
The bodies of the Ancestors -
the ones killed by the Snake -
cover the earth.
"Everywhere, everywhere!"
But who can find them?
Who can name them?
If you would know this country,
you must know its stories
"In early days, yiriti,"
Tjupurrula says,
"bush people carried the Song.
They carried it in drought times
through dry country,
travelling at night.
Once, when I was wiyai,
a little boy, we came -
Mummy, Father, two sisters -
from our own country to the Rock,
to Uluru, following the track
of the Old Ones
silently, looking, looking,
coming to the Mother Place,
to the borning country of every ocean.
"People traveled here
when the land filled up
with children who had no memory of rain.
From Putardi, Triinya and Karli Karru;
from Muruntji, Atila and Wimparraku,
they came
All the families:
some from the north,
some from the south,
some east, some west. . .
Tribes didn't matter.
They said ?'hello';
they talked quietly;
they shared meat, kuka.
Together,
they looked at the rainless sky.
"Tjila, dry; Ilpili, dry;
Pangkupirri, dry. Everywhere, dry!
Payback was forget about;
no argument, no eye.
Just men and women coming from forever.
Women must help, too!
Women and men, coming to Uluru. . .
"With one, special Song, they knew,
they had the power to sing the Snake.
They could make him remember them;
they could change his mind."
The spell of the Tongue:
a hundred hundred round the Rock,
crying out for water,
deep-lunged,
cracking the voice,
mimicking thunder, chanting:
"Kapi! Kapi! Kapi!"
Hands gesturing the air
night and day, circling,
until the voices became one voice
rising, falling. . .
a Song-chant for water,
becoming sure of itself.
"Wind might be hot.
Sky might be blue. Country all about -
dust. . .
Never mind.
We didn't look for cloud;
we didn't listen for thunder -
we had the power to sing the Snake;
to wake it, to move it,
curled in the earth;
to make it sorry. . ."
And when the Snake stirred
("if the singing was strong and true"),
it would push the water out
from its rockhole on top -
from that danger place, the place where
every river in the world begins
and ends.
"And like blood,
it would flow down, fall down,
alatji, everywhere, every side. . .
just like on TV:
Kapi1 Kapi! Kapi!
for all the thirsty people
for all us perishin' mob."
Rain?
"No. Not rain," he says. "Water
from inside, where the Snake lives.
Inside the stone."
You saw all this, I asked;
water bubbling up out of dry rock?"
"Course," he says;
"in early days, olden times;
you know,
before the whitefellas came,
when bush people had the power
to sing the Snake.
Water everywhere -
all the way, everyway
no worries,
from the Rock, and
fall down, fall down
fall down
without clouds. . . without rain!"
-Billy Marshall Stoneking
Not that there's anything wrong with it...
Those are lovely poems, dlowan and Cav. Wow!
Quote:The ease...the comfort...the zest! with which you women fall towards the flames speaks with clear and resonant voice to your relationship with Evil. That is, you are drawn to it. Inevitability - is there anything more commonly denied?
You are drawn down inexorably...shall we speak honestly? is your gender capable of honesty?...to us. A source of evil you truly are, just as is the moon a source of light.
Lovely writing, Blatham........but isn't the reasoning a bit circular? Or is it? I mean, if women are drawn to the flames......the snake, which would be the source of evil? Hummmm........ Mins are as "evil" as the wimmins. Let's all charm the snake.
Women ARE evil. Just downscale.
...and as to the Lawrence poem...jesus christ, that man could write
Oh yes, he certainly could.
Interesting, isn't it, how Lawrence as well as the book of Genesis refer to the snake as "He"? It confirms what I have always thought...the source of evil is masculine, not feminine.
However, wimmins are fast learners.
Lawrence could write indeed...that was never in question for me, despite the fact that I hated Lady Chatterly's Lover. However, I make a simple comment about a theory that Lawrence was a latent homosexual, which is documented (or theorized, depending on your persuasion), and then find a lovely snake poem from an Aussie poet just for the bunny, and then, I am criticized for my post regarding Lawrence. Now Lola clearly understood the beauty of both poems, as did I. She is the better woman IMO. Maybe it's not wimmins who are evil, perhaps it's just the bunny.
Lol! Latent is different from gay, dearie. Wasn't a criticism, 'twas a factual challenge.
I think we are all latent homosexuals.
But it is, indeed, a lovely snake poem.
I think we are all latent polymorphous perverts, bunny.
