Saturday Goddess Blogging

NTodd Talk

You Listen

It Didn't Stop Being True Just Because They Put Music On iPods And Porn On Laptops

They call it terror
if you are few and have no B-52s
if you are not a head of state
with an army and police
if you have neither napalm
nor tanks nor electronic battlefields
terror is if you are dispossessed
and have only your own two hands
each other
and your rage
It is not terror
if you are New York’s Finest
and you shoot a ten-year old Black child in the back
because you think Black people
all look like
they’ve just committed a robbery
It is not terror if you are ITT
and buy the men
who line Chilean doctors up in their hospital
corridors
and shoot them for supporting the late
democratic government of their country
It is not terror but heroism
if you were captured by the Vietnamese
for dropping fragmentation bombs
on their schools and hospitals
Only those who have nothing
can be terrorists
.......

a poem by the Women of the Weather Underground, from Sing a Battle Song: Poetry by Women in the Weather Underground Organization (Factory School/Southpaw Culture, 2006; originally published in 1975 by the Red Dragon Print Collective)

Talking Bout A Revolution

Jung's Hotel By Nancy A. Henry

Here in the nightstand drawer
no Gideon's Bible, but
The Golden Bough.

Oh Carl! The curtains
wear Mandalas,
the Peyote tea's the finest.

In the bathroom
with its tiled echoes
and metaphoric plumbing
our reflections come back to us
mask-like, above a sink
that is a vortex of all
the mythic rivers of the dreamworld.

My New Name For A Blog

What Athenae Said.

Kali on a keyring, Democrats. Stop this shit. It is just not fucking helpful.

Ghandi Peace Brigade Talk. You Listen.

Read this.

The Last Few Marigolds Peeking Up Through The Fallen Leaves

A Lovely Day To Rake Leaves

The oak leaves don't turn pretty colors, but this year the maples and the beeches are especially colorful. One last autumn rose. And some rose hips.

Go If You Must; Stay If You Will. Hail And Farewell!

Denise Lee has an amazing post in Matrifocus on how we die. I find it oddly appropriate for this time of year when the trees are "dying," when the light is "dying" and when we naturally turn inward.

Deathworkers like Joan Halifax confirm what I've observed at the side of those who are dying: We can perceive the changes as the dying person says goodbye to the elements — to earth, water, fire and, lastly, air.

The element of earth is the first whose power leaves us. As earth departs, the dying person's body loses its strength and becomes thin and heavy. She may feel she is falling or sinking. Her skin begins to pale. She grows drowsy and finds it harder and harder to open her eyes. Earth is losing its ability to provide a base for consciousness, and dissolves into the element of water, bringing an image of shimmering, of a mirage.

As water leaves her, the skin, lips and eyes feel dry. She thirsts, as the waters of the body recede, and emotions move beyond her grasp. Bodily sensations dwindle, alternating between heat and cold, and she senses she is being swept away, as though by very fast water. Water is no longer able to support consciousness, and fire is taking over, bringing a vision of haze and smoke.

As the fire element burns out, she perceives the world as hot, while her skin and breath grow colder. In this phase, those close and familiar to her become unreachable. Perception is dissipating, and sight and sound become confused. The dying person has visions of sparks and fireflies as fire dissolves into air.

Finally, air loses its power, and she has more and more trouble breathing. The inbreaths become short and labored, while the outbreaths become longer. She is totally still and unaware of the outside world. Her last feeling of contact with the physical environment is slipping away; the ten winds move into her heart, inhalation and exhalation cease, and she is no longer mindful of this world.

At this point, all the elements have dissolved into the ether — the dying person is at center, and anger, illusion and ignorance cease.

How do you want to die?

********************************************

More from Denise on death here.

A Chant For The Long Dark Nights

Trustworthy

Is It Just Me, Or Is It Getting Dark In Here?

It gets dark earlier and earlier every evening. We're headed, mad dash now, towards the dark. In just five weeks, we'll reach the day of the longest dark. And, how will you spend it? What would you do, if you knew that you had unlimited time in the dark to do it? I've been feeling, ever since Samhein, a much more pronounced thinning of the veil than is normal. I expect it to begin to solidify by Yule. What would you like to do, what do you need to do, before the veil again becomes opaque?

We're headed for the Long Night, when my circle tells stories, sings songs, stays up late, and gets up early to make enough noise to wake the Sun. I treasure that night, spent in the bosom of my circle, spent surrounded by women who help me through the silent dark and into the noisy light. Someday, I am counting on them to make enough noise to wake the ferryman for me, to see me over the River Styx, to watch with me through the longest dark.

Who do you count upon for that? What does the dark hold for you now?

Sex By Jan Haag

I live straight down from the zoo
and I think about sex, easing in
pulling out, the soft swinging
penises of snow leopards

in the dark, the nubbins of apes
the reproductive rites of giraffes,
the passions of pachyderms,
emus seeking grace, peacocks

shrieking and shuddering, bats
flying, cats crying -- armadillos
rattle with lust, flamingos
stand on one leg, the gnu

waits wondering. Under the sun
and the moon, do they think
about me, lying down hill,
living so close to the zoo?

Bitch

Andi Ziesler, editorial director of the magazine Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture, has a great piece in the WaPo about the use of the word "bitch" to describe Hillary Clinton:

Bitch is a word we use culturally to describe any woman who is strong, angry, uncompromising and, often, uninterested in pleasing men. We use the term for a woman on the street who doesn't respond to men's catcalls or smile when they say, "Cheer up, baby, it can't be that bad." We use it for the woman who has a better job than a man and doesn't apologize for it. We use it for the woman who doesn't back down from a confrontation.

So let's not be disingenuous. Is it a bad word? Of course it is. As a culture, we've done everything possible to make sure of that, starting with a constantly perpetuated mindset that deems powerful women to be scary, angry and, of course, unfeminine -- and sees uncompromising speech by women as anathema to a tidy, well-run world.
...

I'm guessing that Hillary Clinton . . . has a somewhat similar stance on the word. After all, people who don't like Clinton have been throwing the slur at her since at least 1991. So everybody else in the room laughed knowingly when a woman at a campaign event in South Carolina last Monday asked McCain, "How do we beat the bitch?"

In fact, the most surprising thing about the whole dust-up (available on YouTube for the world to see) is that something like it didn't happen sooner. Sure, it was disrespectful of McCain to laugh off the insult. (Rather than admonishing the questioner, he called it an "excellent question," then added, "I respect Senator Clinton.") And sure, the woman who asked the question was transparently courting sound-bite fame. (Congratulations, faceless woman! Stay classy!) But for Clinton, this episode has to be pretty much a case of another day, another insult.

These days, the people hurling the term at Clinton are her direct opponents: Republicans, social conservatives, assorted Schlafly-ites and Coulter-ites, and that sludgy, amorphous pool of across-the-board woman-haters.

Their hatred for Clinton has nothing to do with whether she fits the Merriam-Webster Dictionary definition: "a malicious, spiteful, or domineering woman -- sometimes used as a generalized term of abuse." It certainly has nothing to do with her stance on particular issues. When these people call Clinton (or House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, or Sen. Dianne Feinstein or former vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro) a bitch, or even the cutesier "rhymes-with-witch," it's an expression of pure sexism -- a hope that they can shut up not only one woman but every woman who dares to be assertive. Simply put: If you don't like Clinton's stance on, say, health care or Iraq, there are plenty of ways to say so without invoking her gender.

Plenty of people are lukewarm on Clinton, for a variety of reasons: her support for the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act, her ham-fisted attempts to put forth a clear position on Iraq, the fear that she would be just as beholden to corporate interests as her predecessor. Then there are the women who chafe at the idea that they're expected to vote their sex rather than their specific politics. But very few of these people seem to worry that Clinton isn't warm enough, or that she's too dowdy or mannish or whatever can't-win descriptor is lobbed her way daily.

I'll just add that one needn't call names to denigrate Clinton, or any woman, for being a woman. If I read one more time, on one more liberal blog, that "there's just something about her personality," or "it's her speaking voice," or "she's way too ambitious," or "I don't like dynasties," or "she didn't apologize sincerely enough" I'm going to take a hostage.

The Witch By Theodora Goss

Sometimes in the morning, the mist curled into the corners
Of the house like a cat, and Grimalkin, she would cry,
come to me, my Grimalkin. She would gather
the mist to her, and stroke it, and it would settle
in her lap, and lick itself.

Sometimes, she wove
cobwebs and out of the cloth, thin, gray, luminescent,
she would cut the pattern for a dress. But for what purpose?
Where could she wear it? Where could she go, except
to the pond, where she would kneel and dip her fingers
into the water, and stir, and out would jump
a trout, thick, silver, luminescent, and splashing
water onto her dress, whose hem was already
soaked and covered with mud.

She would make it speak,
recite Shakespearean sonnets, sing old songs,
before she put it into the pot. Witches
are lonely, but also hungry, and practical
in their impracticality. She had learned
how from her mother, the old witch, now dead
if witches are ever entirely dead, which is doubtful.

She never wondered who her father had been,
a peasant gathering wood, perhaps a hunter,
perhaps even a prince, on his way to the country
where a princess had been promised for dispatching
a dragon or something similar, and had seen
a light through the trees, and found her mother waiting,
and perhaps gone on the next morning, and perhaps not.

Her mother had built the house by the edge of the pond,
out of gray stone and branches of white birch,
birds’ nests and moss, and spit to hold it together.
That is how witches build what they call houses.
What they are not: sturdy, comfortable.
What they are: cold.

There was still a row of bottles
in the cupboard, holding martens’ eyes, dried frogs,
robins' eggs, random feathers, balls of string,
oak galls. She had forgotten what they were for.
From the rafters hung a fox's skeleton.

Once, village girls had come to visit her mother
for charms to attract the schoolmaster's attention,
make their rivals' hair fall out, abortions.

Afterward, they would say, Did you see her? Standing
by the door? In her ragged dress, with her tangled hair,
I tell you, she creeps me out. But they stopped coming
after the old witch disappeared and her daughter
was left alone. Sometimes she would remember
the smell of the bread in their pockets, the clink of coins,
their dresses covered with embroidery,
their whispering, and look at her reflection
in the pond, floating on the water like a ghost.

Sometimes she made the frogs at the edge of the pond,
calling to one another, speak to her.
"Pretty one," they would say, "in your spider silk,
in your birchbark shoes, like a princess lost in the woods,
kiss us." But she knew that was not her story.

Sometimes she would make the birds perch on her fingers
and sing to her: warblers, thrushes, chickadees,
and sing to them out of tune, then break their necks
and roast them.

Sometimes she would gather the stones
that had fallen from her house, and think of making
a dog, a stone dog. Then, she would forget.
It was the forgetting that made her what she was,
her mother's daughter. Witches never remember
important things: that fire burns, and that bottles
labeled poison are not to be drunk. Witches
are always doing what they should not, dancing
at midnight with the Gentleman, kicking their skirts
over the tops of their stockings, kissing frogs
they know perfectly well won't turn into princes.

She makes no magic. Although the stories won't tell you,
witches are magic. They do not need the props
of a magician, the costumes or the cards,
the scarves, the rabbits. They came down from the moon
originally, and it still calls to them,
so they go out at night, when the moon is shining,
and make no magic, but magic happens around them.

Sometimes at night she would look up at the moon
and call Mother? Mother? but never got an answer.

I want you to imagine: her ragged dress,
her hair like cobwebs, her luminescent eyes,
mad as all witches are, stirring the pond
like a cauldron (witches need no cauldrons, whatever
the stories tell you) while above her the clouds
are roiling and a storm is about to gather.





*****************

Art found here.

Keep Talking, Diane, You Total Tool. There's A Spot In The Duckpit With Your Name On It.

Goddess bless the amazing women of DC Code Pink.

What's Gone Missing With iPods and Malls and Land Rovers

Lunaea is right: this blog and associated shop are adorable, and perfect for Novembers, etc. I especially love Soup and Pipe, Magic, and Lavender.

Our world needs more room for the Rimas of the world:

Their wagon is home and warm and they love best of all to wake parked in a forested byway with their mistbreaths curling out into the bright crisp morning air, and a cup of tea in hand, and the little woodfire crackling and a new town to visit that day full of new as yet un-met people to buy their pictures.

Vanity Fair

One of the minor ironies of the Bush interregnum is that Graydon Carter -- editor of a glossy magazine devoted to movie stars, ads for expensive watches and clothes, and the occasional gossipy story about some media mogul -- has for some time written some of the best and most accurately scathing attacks on the reigning junta. His Editor's Letter in this month's Vanity Fair -- spliced between ads for Land Rovers, articles about stage moms, and a photo spread featuring Julia Roberts -- is one of his best and one that gives me a great deal of hope.

Discussing a fictional account of a Tony-Blair-like former British Prime Minister who gets called to account for his role in approving torture, Carter notes:

All things being equal, such a legal fate may well await not only Tony Blair but our own President Bush, once his clenched-white fingers have been pried from the nuclear “football” for the last time, in January 2009. It is now evident that the United States, beginning at the very top levels of the administration, has been engaged in a coordinated and widespread campaign of extraordinary rendition and real torture—offenses that would have appalled most thinking Americans an administration ago. Thanks to a major report in The New York Times in October, we furthermore know that the Bush White House was enabled at every stage by a compliant Justice Department that clandestinely re-wrote U.S. laws so that the president wouldn’t technically be in violation of them when he broke them.

A year before his Iraq invasion, Bush sent a memo to his Cabinet declaring that the administration would hereafter not be constrained by the principles of the 1949 Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War. The White House document argued that, because a war on “terrorism” was not a conflict with a particular state or “High Contracting Parties,” the rules of war as stipulated by the Convention—especially those involving torture and due process—did not apply. Detainees suspected of having ties to al-Qaeda would thus not be covered by the historic conventions of war, because al-Qaeda is not a conventional nation-state. The administration then sought to legally and narrowly define what torture was. (Remember those balmy days of our youth when we got in a snit over a president who was parsing what was or was not sex?) Almost every manner of humiliation and punishment short of major-organ failure or death was declared permissible under the administration’s definition of torture. Note: the Concise Oxford English Dictionary defines torture as the infliction of severe bodily pain—as punishment or means of persuasion. It is worth remembering that America and her allies emerged victorious from both World War II and the Cold War without resorting to any form of organized or authorized torture.

Water-boarding, as we all know, gets two thumbs up from this administration. I’ve read many descriptions of it, but Robert Harris has one in The Ghost that is to the point. The prisoner is tightly bound to an inclined board with his feet higher than his head. His face is covered with cloth or cellophane, and when water is poured over it—some of which might leak into his lungs—the prisoner experiences an immediate drowning sensation. Harris says C.I.A. officers who have been subjected to water-boarding during their training have lasted an average of 14 seconds before giving up. Water-boarding can result in damage to the lungs and the brain, as well as long-term psychological trauma. In 1947, Harris says, a Japanese officer was convicted of a war crime for water-boarding an American prisoner and was sentenced to 15 years’ hard labor.

Last year, the Supreme Court ruled that the administration’s program for trials of accused terrorists by military commissions violated the Uniform Code of Military Justice as well as Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. Article 3 is very clear on two points this White House has chosen to ignore. Subsection (c) forbids “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment” (my italics), and Subsection (d) forbids “the passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples” (my italics again).

Should this all follow the president out of office, . . . the lieutenants and functionaries who provided enabling documentation should recall that, when it comes to war crimes, following orders is no defense. No less an authority than Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s chief propagandist, had this to say on the subject in an article he published in May 1944: “No international law of warfare is in existence which provides that a soldier who has committed a mean crime can escape punishment by pleading as his defense that he followed the commands of his superiors. This holds particularly true if those commands are contrary to all human ethics and opposed to the well-established international usage of warfare.” Goebbels was talking not about the Nazi atrocities—war criminals rarely discuss their own atrocities—but about Allied aerial-bombing attacks on Germany. And just as his words came back to haunt him, the White House’s re-writing of our own codes of conduct will most surely come back to haunt them and us.

About the only thing stopping the International Criminal Court from going after the president, the vice president, and the former secretary of defense and attorneys general is that the U.S. is not a signatory to its conventions of warfare. Most nations (and all other Western nations) are, but not us. China’s not a signatory; neither is Iraq. Such is the company we keep these days. You don’t even have to care about the safety of detainees in our custody to care about this issue, because it also governs how other nations treat our sons and daughters (or, in the case of the Iraq war, fathers and mothers of people in their 20s) when they are captured.

At the end of the day, the torture conversation is a reflection of how much America’s moral compass has shifted since 9/11. The administration’s colossally wrongheaded reaction to the attacks has caused the U.S. to retreat to the dark, Cheney-esque shadows. The issue of torture goes to the heart of any discussion of who we are as a world citizen. It is not just the top levels of the administration that bear the guilt of war crimes committed in our name. Every government lawyer who helped construct the legal paper trail for the White House is guilty. So are the administration underlings who turned blind eyes to things they knew were wrong. Every legislator and journalist who chose silence over the withering furies of right-wing demagogues and talk-radio hosts is guilty, too. We are all guilty, and we should be ashamed. A nation that used to be better than its enemies has, under the Bush administration, become its own worst enemy.

Carter has been doing this sort of thing since the beginning, back when it was as good as your job (Phil Donahue) or your entire career (the Dixie Chicks) to dare to even suggest that the emperor might be a bit shy of leggings, shirts, and various other accoutrements. I especially appreciate his acknowledgement that, "We are all guilty and we should be ashamed." I'm guilty of letting this go on. You're guilty. It's done in our name with out tax dollars and it's done because there aren't enough of us willing to throw ourselves against the barricades until it fucking stops. I hope that I live to see the war criminals tried and punished. Many of them are likely to live a long time and Karma, that brilliant bitch Goddess, is reputed to have a v. long memory. Now it would be nice of the folks in the middle, you know, the "serious" journalists somewhere above dirty bloggers and the silly editors of high-end gossip mags, would start to do some of the heavy lifting. Carter's been almost on his own for quite some time.

The Star Splitter By Robert Frost

You know Orion always comes up sideways.
Throwing a leg up over our fence of mountains,
And rising on his hands, he looks in on me
Busy outdoors by lantern-light with something
I should have done by daylight, and indeed,
After the ground is frozen, I should have done
Before it froze, and a gust flings a handful
Of waste leaves at my smoky lantern chimney
To make fun of my way of doing things,
Or else fun of Orion's having caught me.
Has a man, I should like to ask, no rights
These forces are obliged to pay respect to?"
So Brad McLaughlin mingled reckless talk
Of heavenly stars with hugger-mugger farming,
Till having failed at hugger-mugger farming,
He burned his house down for the fire insurance
And spent the proceeds on a telescope
To satisfy a life-long curiosity
About our place among the infinities.

"What do you want with one of those blame things?"
I asked him well beforehand. "Don't you get one!"
"Don't call it blamed; there isn't anything
More blameless in the sense of being less
A weapon in our human fight," he said.
"I'll have one if I sell my farm to buy it."
There where he moved the rocks to plow the ground
And plowed between the rocks he couldn't move,
Few farms changed hands; so rather than spend years
Trying to sell his farm and then not selling,
He burned his house down for the fire insurance
And bought the telescope with what it came to.
He had been heard to say by several:
"The best thing that we're put here for's to see;
The strongest thing that's given us to see with's
A telescope. Someone in every town
Seems to me owes it to the town to keep one.
In Littleton it may as well be me."
After such loose talk it was no surprise
When he did what he did and burned his house down.
Mean laughter went about the town that day
To let him know we weren't the least imposed on,
And he could wait--we'd see to him to-morrow.
But the first thing next morning we reflected
If one by one we counted people out
For the least sin, it wouldn't take us long
To get so we had no one left to live with.
For to be social is to be forgiving.
Our thief, the one who does our stealing from us,
We don't cut off from coming to church suppers,
But what we miss we go to him and ask for.
He promptly gives it back, that is if still
Uneaten, unworn out, or undisposed of.
It wouldn't do to be too hard on Brad
About his telescope. Beyond the age
Of being given one's gift for Christmas,*
He had to take the best way he knew how
To find himself in one. Well, all we said was
He took a strange thing to be roguish over.
Some sympathy was wasted on the house,
A good old-timer dating back along;
But a house isn't sentient; the house
Didn't feel anything. And if it did,
Why not regard it as a sacrifice,
And an old-fashioned sacrifice by fire,
Instead of a new-fashioned one at auction?

Out of a house and so out of a farm
At one stroke (of a match), Brad had to turn
To earn a living on the Concord railroad,
As under-ticket-agent at a station
Where his job, when he wasn't selling tickets,
Was setting out up track and down, not plants
As on a farm, but planets, evening stars
That varied in their hue from red to green.

He got a good glass for six hundred dollars.
His new job gave him leisure for star-gazing.
Often he bid me come and have a look
Up the brass barrel, velvet black inside,
At a star quaking in the other end.
I recollect a night of broken clouds
And underfoot snow melted down to ice,
And melting further in the wind to mud.
Bradford and I had out the telescope.
We spread our two legs as it spread its three,
Pointed our thoughts the way we pointed it,
And standing at our leisure till the day broke,
Said some of the best things we ever said.
That telescope was christened the Star-splitter,
Because it didn't do a thing but split
A star in two or three the way you split
A globule of quicksilver in your hand
With one stroke of your finger in the middle.
It's a star-splitter if there ever was one
And ought to do some good if splitting stars
'Sa thing to be compared with splitting wood.

We've looked and looked, but after all where are we?
Do we know any better where we are,
And how it stands between the night to-night
And a man with a smoky lantern chimney?
How different from the way it ever stood?

* Of being given one for Christmas gift.