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Sunday, February 12, 2012

Solve et Coagula

"Unless you make yourself equal to God, you cannot understand God: for the like is not intelligible save to the like. Make yourself grow to a greatness beyond measure, by a bound free yourself from the body; raise yourself above all time, become Eternity; then you will understand God. Believe that nothing is impossible for you, think yourself immortal and capable of understanding all, all arts, all sciences, the nature of every living being. Mount higher than the highest height; descend lower than the lowest depth. Draw into yourself all sensations of everything created, fire and water, dry and moist, imagining that you are everywhere, on earth, in the sea, in the sky, that you are not yet born, in the maternal womb, adolescent, old, dead, beyond death. If you embrace in your thought all things at once, times, places, substances, qualities, quantities, you may understand God."

---Giordano Bruno


"...God becomes as we are, that we may be as he is."
---William Blake


Sunday, February 5, 2012

Cool Fez!


Sebastian and Aloysius



ARCHIBALD

The bear that sits above my bed
A doleful bear he is to see;
From out his drooping pear-shaped head
His woollen eyes look into me.
He has no mouth, but seems to say:
'They'll burn you on the Judgement Day.'

Those woollen eyes, the things they've seen
Those flannel ears, the things they've heard -
Among horse-chestnut fans of green,
The fluting of an April bird,
And quarrelling downstairs until
Doors slammed at Thirty One West Hill.

The dreaded evening keyhole scratch
Announcing some return below
The nursery landing's lifted latch,
The punishment to undergo
Still I could smooth those half-moon ears
And wet that forehead with my tears.

Whatever rush to catch a train,
Whatever joy there was to share
Of sounding sea-board, rainbowed rain,
Or seaweed-scented Cornish air,
Sharing the laughs, you still were there,
You ugly, unrepentant bear.

When nine, I hid you in a loft
And dared not let you share my bed;
More aged now he is to see,
His woollen eyes have thinner thread,
But still he seems to say to me,
In double-doom notes, like a knell:
'You're half a century nearer Hell.'

Self-pity shrouds me in a mist,
And drowns me in my self-esteem.
The freckled faces I have kissed
Float by me in a guilty dream.
The only constant, sitting there,
Patient and hairless, is a bear.

And if an analyst one day
Of school of Adler, Jung or Freud
Should take this aged bear away,
Then, oh my God, the dreadful void!
its draughty darkness could but be
Eternity, Eternity.

 ---John Betjeman

Don't Blink

Therion - Ginnungagap (Live)

Rebecca's Hymn


Rebecca’s Hymn

WHEN Israel, of the Lord beloved,
Out of the land of bondage came,
Her fathers’ God before her moved,
An awful guide, in smoke and flame.
By day, along the astonish’d lands
The cloudy pillar glided slow;
By night, Arabia’s crimson’d sands
Return’d the fiery column’s glow.

There rose the choral hymn of praise,
And trump and timbrel answer’d keen,
And Zion’s daughters pour’d their lays,
With priest’s and warrior’s voice between.
No portents now our foes amaze,
Forsaken Israel wanders lone;
Our fathers would not know Thy ways,
And Thou hast left them to their own.

But present still, though now unseen,
When brightly shines the prosperous day
Be thoughts of Thee a cloudy screen
To temper the deceitful ray.
And oh, when stoops on Judah’s path
In shade and storm the frequent night,
Be Thou, long-suffering, slow to wrath,
A burning and a shining light!

Our harps we left by Babel’s streams,
The tyrant’s jest, the Gentile’s scorn;
No censer round our altar beams,
And mute are timbrel, harp and horn,
But Thou hast said, the blood of goat,
The flesh of rams, I will not prize;
A contrite heart, a humble thought,
Are Mine accepted sacrifice.

---Sir Walter Scott