Remembering Briar Rose

Remembering Briar Rose

April 23, 2007

As I walk down the street of the small town with Thieu, I find myself gripped by an awareness of just how tragic the old myths that we try to cling to really are. Always, there is something incomplete and unfulfilled. The old stories always remember some sort of sorrow. But it is only as we approach the old stories with the light of science, that we begin to discover that it is not the spindle which was to blame.

The spindle, of course, was the symbol of a heresy that entered the Lands of the Lily with the return of the paladins of the First Crusade. The heretics rejected the misogyny and brutality which they found in the Old Testament and as a result, insisted that Moses could not have been a Prophet of God. They further rejected the Laws of Power & Control which had created the feudal system, and encouraged their adherents to become free tradesmen. As a result, like the people who now form the economic backbone of Sam Rainsy’s party, they became textile workers.

Curious forms of belief had always flourished among the peasantry, but this creed of the Cathars represented a moral challenge which the Masters of Power could only control by announcing that the honeymoon phase of Christian scholasticism was now over. The heretics would all be burned on stakes, and the angels would blush at the portent. The dawn of the light of reason would be turned into blood by the smoke, and the resulting enchantment would make the European renaissance sleep for at least 100 years.

But did Prince Charming really have the power to break the horrid spell? He believed that when he kissed the princess in the coffin and raised her up out of her trance, everything in the kingdom would also be revived and redeemed.

Briar Rose awakened, but the spell of the Wicked Fairy had not been entirely broken. Ever after, the people of the kingdom blamed their hundred-year stupor on the spindle. As a result, grown-ups became afraid to touch spindles, and the textile industry became afflicted with the curse of child labor.

In addition, the rumor began to be spread that anyone who worked to restore the dignity of the textile industry must be the servant of Satan. As a result, those who worshiped in the Temple of Labor, and did not contribute their alms to the Cathedral, were subjected to horrible tortures. In addition, all of the Jews and the Muslims were given the choice between being bathed in the Blood of the Lamb, or fleeing from the kingdom before the clock could strike midnight.

Briar Rose and Prince Charming believed that they had been redeemed, but all around them, the Devil was taking cotrol of the kingdom. Romantic Love may have survived the inquisition, but it did so at the expense of losing touch with reality. That is why Miss Rose and Mr. Charming could believe that their love had conquered all, and ignore the fact that the cattle cars on the way to the slaughterhouse were filled with real humans.

The people believed, and elected to offer their allegiance to the God of the Lie, whose religion is compulsion, and whose rites demand human sacrifice. Because Ahura Mazda refuses to rule by compulsion, he had to abide by the outcome of the plebecite. And so that is why, on the same morning that Briar Rose was awakened by Prince Charming’s kiss and rose up out of the coffin, God had to lie down like a dead man to take the poor girl’s place.

We walked along, till the road began to speak with Mexican accents that remembered Medieval Spain. As we proceeded we came on a peddlar, whose donkey was pulling a cart.

His cart was all loaded with two grandfather clocks, as well as musical instruments and automotive parts. There, alloyed from various mixtures of copper and brass, were several shining hearts, which became music boxes when they were wound up.⁷ⁱ

I wound up the key, to listen to the melody. And that was when I realized that the heart that was being sold by the pedlar with the donkey cart, was mine.

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We Fight Not Flesh & Blood

We Fight Not Flesh & Blood

April 9, 2007

    It’s true, as Thieu has discovered. I always have loved the sort of women who could hurt me. I always have felt that I gained a higher wisdom from enduring the scars.

    The sickness which horrifies us when we look out on the world, is the sickness of a world where everyone is either controlled or controlling. Is this not the significance of the popular obsession with “security?” We are insecure because we understand too well that if we fail to offer ourselves as pawns to somebody’s power and control scheme, we are likely to find ourselves deprived of resources, and socially impotent.

    We gain nothing by trying to blame the Arabs or the Communists for this condition. We must examine the conditions of our own society, as well as the proclivities within us which cause us to demand that societies & relationships should be organized according to the traditional European paradigm.

    Before Hitler, before the Boer Renaissance established an Apartheid Regime in South Africa, we should have examined the way that the U.S. Cavalry shot down the unarmed Ghost Dancers who were trying to celebrate Christmas by crying out to their raptured loved ones.

    At the time the cavalrymen thought themselves heroes. The photographs that survive speak to us with the same pathos as photojournalism from Rawanda, Belsen, or Tuoul Sleng. The tide which had enabled the PaxtonBoys to massacre friendly Indians, the tide of the Legions of the New Rome who slew 96 Christian but Indian martyrs at Gnaddenhutten, the tide of the West-More-Land Movement had gone forth from Westmoreland County and was demonstrating its power to tear up the prairies of the Dakotas with the Hotchkiss Automatic Cannon.
    No wonder the prairie states are so often visited by hail and tornadoes. No wonder the good topsoil of Kansas followed the dead Indians on a pilgrimage to the Pure Land. We may forget that so many of the movers and shakers who conquered the West were perpetrators of deliberate genocide – but the souls of the victims have been given a right to stamp their stories on our memories by whatever means may be necessary. If this means sending hail and tornadoes – then hail, tornadoes, Kansas dust storms, and economic depressions are what we shall reap.
    This forgotten sin is the reason for our obsession with “Security.” The ghosts shall continue to move until we remember the ones who were not only scalped, but had their breasts and their genitals cut off so the men of the Denver Volunteers could come back withtrophies. Before Hitler we had General Custer and before Custer we had the ordained Methodist minister and Civil War hero – Colonel Chivington.

    By the turn of the century, old pioneers and the new breed of real estate speculators would gather in the Barbary Coast Saloons to lament the death of Manifest Destiny. They would send the young men East with the stories which would confirm their heroism, and the book would be closed. The book was closed, and nobody paid any attention to the writhing and squirming class warfare that was going on under the covers, until the Second Coming of Westmoreland.
    It was not until readers began to realize that they had been reading about General Westmoreland every day for month after month, that the ealy harbingers of culture began to waken to the horrific realization that the old God of Manifest Destiny was not dead at all. He had been stunned for a moment by the immensity of the Pacific Ocean, but now he had learned how to cross. He was marching West again, and was massacring the brown villagers ofthe hamlets of South-East Asia with new and improved types of machine gun.

    Things have gotten so bad, it is common to hear people say, it is impossible for anyone to succeed in this world until he has made some private peace with the Devil. The Support Group has arisen from the necessity of correcting this all-too-popular assumption. The ground of the Support Group is the understanding that the Devil is our own shadow, and that we need to support each other in our struggles to avoid being possessed.
    Thieu and I walk out in the evening, to a place where the campfire is burning. In the bright light the shadows are flickering, as the survivors tell stories that go all the way back to the times when the first support groups were being formed, way back in the ‘60’s.
The spirits are watching from the crackling flame – spirits who found peace by embracing The Rapture, when the repeating rifles and early machine guns has been brought out to silence the voices of the Natives.
    The wood in the fire crackles with pops that resound like gunshots. The smoke brings tears to our eyes. We are humbled, witnessing how we are redeemed by the martyrs who were raptured because the conquering “Civilization” lusted to destroy everything that was red.

Just an Umayyad

Location -- in the Turkey Mts., above Las Vegas, NM.
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Thieu and I have driven out to a rural farmworkers’ cabin in the foothills, to enjoy more intimacy.

      I feel the anger of the spirits who are stirring the dust of the Staked Plain. The wrath we feel blazing in the collective soul now bursts forth in the lightning on the mountaintops.

      In the shadows that are made by the stormclouds, the thunder is speaking in a language which has now become almost extinct. Atop the anvil crest of a thunderhead, an Apache warrior looks down with contempt on the so-called “civilization” which has dispossessed his people.

     “I shall tell you why the blood is boiling in your veins,” he proclaims with the voice of thunder. “Many years ago, so long ago that most people have forgotten, the enemies of The Prophet conquered the Iberian Peninsula. When Mullahs rose up to teach the pure truths of the Qu’oran, these Umayyads changed their religion, but still called themselves ‘Cids.’ (a dialectical pronunciation of Si´yid) They became Christian Conquistadors who terrified the decent people with warlike excesses.

      ¨There was not room in all of Spain for these conquistadores, so they built black ships and came to despoil the Pure Land. They conquered the advanced cities on Turtle Island, and burned alive anyone who resisted conversion to their religion.

      “They claimed that they were serving God, but their true aim was to enslave everyone, so that they could live like the Caliphs their ancestors had been. In the process they destroyed the knowledge of great civilizations and drove grace from the earth. They taught a stern morality of cruel abstinence, but their own lusts they did not deny. The women they conquered knew no love, but only the pain of giving birth to the children who had been conceived through rape.”

     “No wonder the Mexicans say, that it is the Devil who commands the affairs of this world!” shudders Thieu.

     “There is a curse which falls on the heads of the conquerors,” continued the Apache in the clouds. “This curse does not act swiftly like a sword, but slowly and insidiously, and eventually brings down those who in their pride thought that they were the Lords of the Earth.

     “And so it came to be,” he continues, “that just as the Umayyads were driven from Arabia and Iran, from Syria and Africa, the Spaniards who acted like Umayyads, and whose kings were actually descentents of Abu Sufiyan, found themselves driven out from many of their dominions by the English colonists. But just as the Abassids demonstrated that they could be as cruel as the Umayyads, and just as merciless to the true descendents of the Fatima, so we who were native to Turtle Island discovered that that the British-Americans could be even more ruthless than the Spaniards.

     “The Spaniards were ruthless in the pursuit of their lusts, and intolerant in the matter of religion, but their lusts could be soothed by the attention of women, and their fanaticism could be turned to advantage by los Indios who were willing to convert to their faith. The British-Americans, on the other hand, claimed to be ruled by secular laws, but their laws did very little to protect the Natives. From the villagers of Gnaddenhutten to the Ghost Dancers of the 1890's, many Natives adopted the faith of Jesus and called the Pale Invaders their brothers. But the British-Americans were colder than the Spaniards; they gunned us down even when we adopted their religion, and their hatreds were only inflamed when they looked upon the beauty of our women.

     “The new invaders invented something they called a Theory – a myth they called Manifest Destiny. They thought they had created something new – but Natives recognized it as the same old faith in human sacrifice which has haunted this land since the first pyramids were raised. They put such store in their faith that they were the most evolved thing on the earth, that when we called them brothers, it aroused the same passion of Auto-da-Fe that their Spanish predecessors had displayed when anyone had dared to doubt their Holy Trinity.

     “We learned to our sorrow that when we addressed them as brothers, we aroused their worst fears. We saw them respond in a murderous rage. It offended them to think that we were humans just like they were, created by the same God, of the same intelligence, with the same capacity for spiritual inspiration, and that we had simply made other choices. It drove them to rage to think that the institutions which had been forced upon Europe by the Christian Inquisition were not the only forms of social order, and might not even be the best. And they were horrified when they were confronted by societies in which men did not control their women. It was true that sometimes our Native men loved more than one woman, but this was never because we herded them together like cattle. Our women were powerful in their own right, and sometimes a man needed another woman that he could run to. This is how it is when you love what you cannot control. And I believe that this challenge, of learning to love what he could not control – I believe that this is what frightened the European the most.”