THE POETRY OF CHEESE AND OTHER RECIPES FOR LIFE

"Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese."
G. K. Chesterton

Today I contributed one of those weird searches that turn up in people's stat counters.
"Chesterton + get a handle on his hedgehog". I also tried just "Chesterton + hedgehog" and did these under images first and then websites.

I was looking for an illustration by Chesterton of a very portly man (maybe a self-portrait), a respectable English gentleman, carrying a large hedgehog instead of a briefcase. I believe it is called "Modern Man Tries to get a handle on his Hedgehog." Alas, I searched to no avail. But I did find a page of great Chesterton quotes and another on-line source about him.

What an interesting man. Like Blake he was both writer and painter, and a mystic, but Chesterton was not a rebel-- he converted to Catholicism (not a big leap from the Anglican Church)-- and apparently he was also a murderer, although I need to read a bit more about that. I wish I could have found that painting, because it aptly illustrates how I feel today.

I don't feel like I am getting any better at the right "recipe for a day". The right mixture of long-term and short-term goals. The proper amounts of both poetics and cheese. Of rest and labour. And how to do each thing fully and completely. Sometimes I get so scattered thinking about all the stuff I need to do, should be doing, forgot to do, etc. I miss half the stuff that is ACTUALLY happening!

And it doesn't help that I am feeling a little depressed this morning about the world, and our society, and hearing The Clash and Madness and Zeppelin in commercials. I suppose in the days of old artists had to devote their works to the Royals and rich to support themselves, but somehow that doesn't seem as cheap as Jimmy Page selling an SUV.

Also, I saw a story that the gap between rich and poor is broadening, and it made me think of an interview with Thom Hartmann I read in The Sun. He talks about how the Bush/Rove dicatorship (okay, he didn't actually say "Bush/Rove dictatorship")wants us all to go back to the economics of Dickens novels. Where there are alot of poor and a small, wealthy elite that controls everything. ("Hey, lots of free labour from the Workhouses!" etc.)

UNTIL NEXT TIME, TOODLE ON!!!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, RABBIE

ROBERT BURNS BIO

ROBERT BURNS POETRY ON-LINE

Almost everyone knows AULD LANG SYNE, and some might know MY LUV IS LIKE A RED, RED ROSE, or if you read J.D. Salinger you know COMING THROUGH THE RYE. Maybe you know SCOTS WHA HAE, or the epic TAM O'SHANTER.

But may favourite song was on my mom's Jean Redpath album, about Bonnie Prince Charlie. I always loved that he uses an old children's fairy rhyme as the last line ("up yon heathery mountain and down yon scroggy glen we dare not go a milking for fear of little men").

I will have to tell you the story some day, about my "boat aristocracy" lineage to the Stewarts. You will laugh. But when I was a little girl I often dreamt of being a Scottish Princess.



Charlie, He's My Darling
1794

'Twas on a Monday morning,
Right early in the year,
That Charlie came to our town,
The young Chevalier.

Chorus-
An' Charlie, he's my darling,
My darling, my darling,
Charlie, he's my darling,
The young Chevalier.

As he was walking up the street,
The city for to view,
O there he spied a bonnie lass
The window looking through,
An' Charlie, &c.

Sae light's he jumped up the stair,
And tirl'd at the pin;
And wha sae ready as hersel'
To let the laddie in.
An' Charlie, &c.

He set his Jenny on his knee,
All in his Highland dress;
For brawly weel he ken'd the way
To please a bonnie lass.
An' Charlie, &c.

It's up yon heathery mountain,
An' down yon scroggie glen,
We dare na gang a milking,
For Charlie and his men,
An' Charlie, &c.

(Twirled at the pin is twirling his kilt. "Brawly weel he ken'd the way" means he really knew how to please a lady. Which, actually, seems very true of Burns himself, and not the Jacobite Prince. Burns was very bawdy and had a reputation as a ladies man.)

UNTIL NEXT TIME, TOODLE ON!!!

LIKE THEY DO IN KATROO

THIS IS MY FAVOURITE BIRTHDAY BOOK!

I would like to have a birthday like they do in Katroo!

Well, between a wee stomach virus and some car problems I have been off-line for the last few days.

Tomorrow I am going to do a small celebration with a friend and go out for lunch and to see TRISTAN AND ISOLDE. (They used the German spelling. I guess because it is more well-known.) I will do my birthday dinner next week as Burns Night, as I usually do.

Tomorrow, I will also do the yearly divination for myself and the world. Also I need to see if I can envision a lively and energizing future. Sometimes, between Samhain and Twelfth Night, I get a different glimpse or see things from new perspective. The coming year looks like it might be a year of changes, not just for me. That's what I got back near Halloween time.


My birthday is the time of year when I feel most that I am a witch...

And I couldn't think of any other pictures or graphics to post!!!

WHEN I WAS YOUNGER AND SLIMMER MANY PEOPLE THOUGHT I LOOKED LIKE SAMANTHA STEVENS.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME!!!

UNTIL NEXT TIME, TOODLE ON!!!

EPIPHANIZED

"This is the moment which I call epiphany. First we recognise that the object is one integral thing, then we recognise that it is an organised composite stru ' cture, a thing in fact: finally, when the relation of the parts is exquisite, when the parts are adjusted to the special point, we recognise that it is that thing which it is. Its soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance. The soul of the commonest object, the structure of which is so adjusted, seems to us radiant. The object achieves its epiphany." --JAMES JOYCE

UNTIL NEXT TIME, TOODLE ON!!!

THE NAUGHTY GIRL

The Naughty Girl: Maryjane.

I was over on Texlahoma's page, and he was, once again, talking about the 420.

Alcohol can go to parties with an escort, but Maryjane is a bad girl. You'd better see her at night, in strange neighbourhoods, or alone, and don't tell anyone. You know why?

She doesn't need big business, or lobbyists. She doesn't create enough illness for insurance companies and hospitals to feed off of. Methadone is actually far more addictive physically than heroin. The high just isn't as good. And you don't have to steal to get it- the government will give it away free! And free for life! Talk about pushers!

And pot is social. And "higher" vibration than other drugs. At best you will feel closer to God, as the Rastafari do, and the worst is you might fall asleep or get paranoid. You never hear "A pot junkie robbed someone to buy weed." Or, "A stoner jumped off a roof cuz he thought he could fly."

And any cop will tell you that he'd rather deal with a stoned person than a drunk person.

Compared to the amount of work (and danger) involved in growing tobacco, marijuana is easy. Tobacco growers have to deal with all sorts of pests and disease. People that work in tobacco fields often get cancer and other tobacco related illnesses. Cigarette companies are already losing customers to weed.

Alcohol will fund a million campaigns before it will let Maryjane take away one dime of it's ill-gotten treasure. The Xanax kings and the Zoloft queens will raise their armies against this usurper. There is big money in pharmo-drugs, and in illness. And that in turn effects the profits for insurance companies, and hospitals, and all the re-hab clinics. (I have never heard of anyone going to a rehab place just for pot. EVER.)

There is even big money in the War on Drugs.

Anyhow, that is why the government fights against legalizing it-- because big Pharmo bucks, and alcohol lobbyists, and cigarette money are fighting MaryJane. There's no legitimate argument against it.

Any why is our society obsessed with keeping a lid on altered states of conscioussness. What are we afraid of? Being drunk can be as disorienting as being really stoned or tripping, why isn't our society afraid of drunks? Their drivers kill people every year around major holidays.

Stoned people just want to stay in! I remember calling Pink Dot one time and -- I am not kidding- ordering cherry vanilla ice cream, a hershey with almonds, a bottle of red wine, a bag of doritos, and nag champa incense-- which they didn't have.

I wonder if all of those straight people that got freaked out when they tried pot realise that not everyone has that reaction? And the stereotypical stoner-- the kid still living in his parent's basement, never leaving the house-- that kid just happens to be a stoner sometimes. There are plenty of late twenty somethings in surburbia, leeching off their parents, that DON'T smoke pot.

So stop blaming my best girl! All she does is enhance the reality you already live in.

UNTIL NEXT TIME, TOODLE ON!!!

WOLVES RESTING NEAR THE FIRE

"...the constructive use of solitude. It requires that we be able to retire from a world that is 'too much with us,' that we be able to be quiet, that we let the solitude work for us and in us. It is characteristic of our time that many people are afraid of solitude: to be alone is a sign one is a social failure, for no one would be alone if he or she could help it.

"It often occurs to me that people living in our modern, hectic civilization, amid the constant din of radio and TV, subjecting themselves to every kind of stimulation whether of the passive sort of TV or the more active sort of conversation, work, and activity, that people with such constant preoccupations find it exceedingly diffcult to let insights from unconscious depths break through. Of course, when an invididual is afraid of the irrational-- that is, of the unconscious dimensions of experience-- he tries to keep busiest, tries to keep the most 'noise' going on about him.

"The avoidance of the anxiety of solitude by constant agitated diversion is what Kierkegaard, in a nice simile, likened to the settlers in the early days of America who used to beat on pots and pans at night to make enough din to keep the wolves away. Obviously if we are to experience insights from our unconscious, we need to be able to to give ourselves to solitude."

--Rollo May, THE COURAGE TO CREATE (The other book I have been reading. ;o)

Well, I have much to report-- and much of it is not good and troubling and bound to trip up all of my new nicely laid plans-- but it is raining here and I have been so satisfyingly ensconced in a domestic bliss of a romance novel (KNIGHT IN SHINING ARMOUR by Jude Deveraux, which I have read many times before), Zankou Chicken (that I went out in the rain for), movies, and reruns of the Rose Parade.

I think that we need more parades (and carnival!). There is something both primitive and festive about them. They make me feel the deadly earnestness of life, back when humans were vulnerable and huge bizarre creatures threatened us. Our earliest parades were of our nightmares and fears and the conquering of them.

I will wear the skin of bear and the tusk of tiger and I will dance around the firelight and the flickering giant shadows, and I will create beauty from mortal fear.

And then of course, the other parade, the (serious yet) joyous cavorting fertility rites of life and greenery and celebration. Our dreams spun from flowers and made enormous.

I loved the pipers, the marching bands, and the equestriennes, especially, but I also love all the floats and how inventive they are. I am putting on my list of things to do in the next forty years of my life "be in a parade, preferably wearing a tiara and long white gloves." Even in pouring rain I would smile and wave the whole five miles!

There are some pretty rotten things going on right now, and a few strange events. But I think I did a little arabesque this weekend. Because I realized that there will constantly be something miserable happening in my life, and I have spent most of my life fighting that.

This weekend, when I got the phone call about the family situation ( I will post later) I determined that I was not going to run from it, but I was not going to let it overcome me. It must be handled properly and I will need stamina, and worrying or getting overwhelmed would not help. And this weekend, there isn't anything I can do about it anyhow.


I snuggled on the couch with cocoa and my book while the old man watched football and we both played with the dog whenever she brought us a toy. When it was time to make calls I made them, but when I was done I went back to my wickedly delicious book and I have enjoyed myself thoroughly.

I will be back tomorrow!

UNTIL NEXT TIME, TOODLE ON!!!