Innocents - into what prisons are ye flung?

To what lowliness are ye bowed?

How are you ground between the laws and the customs?

The dark people of Fomor have ye in thrall; and upon your minds they have fastened a band of lead, your hearts are hung with iron, and about your loins a cincture of brass impressed, woeful!

Believe it, that the sun does shine, the flowers grow, and the birds sing pleasantly in the trees. The free winds are everywhere, the water tumbles on the hills, the eagle calls aloud through the solitude, and his mate comes, speedily.

…Come away! come away from the cubicle, the screen and the desk, from the shop where the carcasses hang, from the broker's den and the lawyers' offices…come away for the dance has begun lightly, the wind is sounding over the hill, the sun laughs in the valley,the sea leaps on the sand, panting for joy, dancing, dancing, dancing

"An odd word that recurs obsessively in the Bible, where it appears in forty passages: "Burn their Asherah in the fire and cut down the idols of their god", "Cut down their Asherah and burn their idols in the fire." How many times and with what stubborn vehemence, does Yahweh enjoin his people. Asherah designates a goddess, the partner of Baal. And at the same time certain sacred poles, which were worshiped. Asherah is a name that condenses within itself the abomination of idolatry. Yet for a long time, until the reign of Manasseh, it happened that "the objects that had been made for Baal, for the Asherah, and for all the heavenly host" were housed inside the temple for Yahweh. For Israel, the perennial risk was that the house of Yahweh still contained the altars of other divine beings. Hence Manasseh "made his son pass through fire and practiced astrology, and magic and dealt with familiar spirits and wizards: he wrought much wickedness in the sight of the LORD, to provoke his to anger. "

Way back when,

when men were still a novelty,

and what towns there were

were smaller than a ballpark,

smaller, often, than a pitch-and-putt

and no one sentimentalized the out-of-doors;

when every man was a man of few words

because there were only a few,

and those so open-ended and adaptable

that to pin them down required great force

and weighted presentation,

so that there was no such thing as a meaningless gesture

and people watched each other –

but there were still, believe me, many secrets

and no one was any the wiser -

many years ago and far away

in the ungenerous badlands of a distant country

where the hot sun addled what the cold night froze

and things were rough all over,

there stood what seemed to it's inhabitants

a very splendid city.

It boasted walls, fine wall, made out of stone

and terrible tall,

and monuments - lot's of monuments -

and most remarkably, a gigantic king.

The cities name was Uruk, or Uruk of the Walls,

and the king was called King Gilgamesh.

King Gilgamesh had a passion for marvels -

and since King Gilgamesh was something of a marvel himself,

the men of Uruk were at pains

to make him comfortable.

For King Gilgamesh was governed only by his passions,

and the city of Uruk was governed only by King Gilgamesh.

Gilgamesh: I am sorry for Enkindu that he died,

he was my brother.

And I am sorrier still that I lost Enkindu

Whom I least of all wanted to lose

and with whom I was friends.

But I am doubly sorry

that I, who have until now never lost anything

Should be stolen from in this manner,

For while I have made selections

Which are a kind of loss,

I have never before been denied.

And I am sorriest of all

And the reason I am crying is

That the death of my brother Enkindu

Has suggested to me that I'll die too

Someday

And I'm scared.

The Old Man: And so King Gilgamesh

the great King Gilgamesh

was bested by a little thing

an unheroic snake

and he broke down altogether

and he wept the tears of a furious child

for he knew himself to be a failure

and he held himself cheap

and there wasn't a thing which he cared to do

and there wasn't a thing for which he cared

and he knew the frustration

of one who cannot have

what he thinks he wants

and he knew the shame

of one who knows that at least in part

he was himself the author

of his own undoing

and he knew the rage

the hideous rage

the helpless, hopeless rage

of somebody who's been stolen from

who knows he will always be stolen from

because he's here

because he's human

and because he must be off his guard

from time to time.

But as bad as these things were -

and they were very bad-

they did not trouble him so much as did the cold and awful

certainty

that he had not truly wished for

this bauble he had been denied.

That it would not and could not have made him happy.

That the only joy it promised wasn't joy at all

But tremulous relief

at being spared the pain of its loss.

And it was this ironic knowledge of

his own, his inconsolable vanity,

Which made him hate his life and everything he had.

And it was this self-same knowledge

Which later gave him the strength, the presence of mind,

And the imagination to act out the rest of his life

As decent and productive man.

So it was with Gilgamesh.

So it has always been.

>>10277250

strooth mate. That's a pedovore.

Remote and ineffectual shill

That dared attack my president

With that poor weapon, half-impelled,

Unlearnt, unsteady, hardly held,

Unworthy for a tilt with men—

Your quavering and corroded pen;

Shill poor at Bed and worse at Table,

Shill pinched, shill starved, shill miserable;

Shill stuttering, shill with roving eyes,

Shill nervous, shill of crudities;

Shill clerical, shill ordinary,

Shill self-absorbed and solitary;

Shill here-and-there, shill epileptic;

Shill puffed and empty, shill dyspeptic;

Shill middle-class, shill sycophantic,

Shill dull, shill brutish, shill pedantic;

Shill hypocritical, shill bad,

Shill furtive, shill three-quarters mad;

Shill (since a man must make an end),

Shill that shall never be my friend.