Missing Witches - MW Diane di Prima - The War is the War for the Human Imagination

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00:00:29.300 blessed if i can be you aren't being a proper woman therefore you must be a witch 0.98

00:00:33.720 you must be a witch did you ever fall in love with the beat poets maybe it was just like a 0.95

00:00:43.460 short but fiery love affair like mine reading on the road in high school and then even more

00:00:49.260 when i slipped into howl and it felt like the world got bigger suddenly cracking open and people

00:00:55.140 were slipping through cracks in the walls, scooting out from under white fences, leaving dry

00:00:59.780 lawns, the prison of tightly constrained identities behind, finding the strange, the road, alleys

00:01:08.280 and bars and bad hotels, your first vision of the thrum of something alive beyond the

00:01:13.840 robot death grip and literal anti-communist, anti-gay, anti-art, anti-woman witch hunts

00:01:20.300 of the day. But the love affair didn't last long, for me at least. Maybe because most of us weren't

00:01:28.080 actually invited. We didn't see ourselves there. When we were taught the beats, even by our most

00:01:34.180 scandalous teacher with the long scarves, there were no women poets in the pantheon. We were never

00:01:40.060 taught that Ginsburg was gay, and we were taught no black voices, no Indian or indigenous people

00:01:45.860 strumming was acknowledged in the beats we were taught there was just a lack and so i took my

00:01:51.640 heart back kept some lessons but kept moving down the road listening to something beyond

00:01:57.320 walking with this feeling unnameable for years that something was missing

00:02:02.640 to be clear they were there those voices those writers those witches they were there in this

00:02:11.580 and most every creative movement that's mattered,

00:02:14.740 and they were fundamental to the magic of the scene

00:02:17.300 and its knowledge and spirit and voice.

00:02:20.520 We usually don't go missing by our own volition.

00:02:26.160 Anyway, I wasn't taught Diane de Prima,

00:02:28.820 and I didn't find her for a long time

00:02:30.560 because that's the way the world goes around,

00:02:32.620 as my daughter says, big John Prine fan over here.

00:02:36.460 But I found de Prima now, and my love is lit,

00:02:39.720 and I'm never letting go.

00:02:41.580 De Prima wrote,

00:03:11.580 bring yourself home to yourself enter the garden the guy at the gate with the flaming sword is

00:03:19.860 yourself the war is the war for the human imagination

00:03:24.620 with amiri baraka crucial black poet of the beats generation father to one of de prima's five

00:03:34.360 children la radio host dominique de prima diane de prima co-edited the literary magazine

00:03:41.560 The Floating Bear. Diane and Amiri ran it together, and then Diane kept it all afloat herself

00:03:49.020 from 1961 to 1971, sending out electrifying new writing directly to a community of writers every

00:03:56.500 couple of weeks. They paid out of pocket or with small donations to publish beat writers,

00:04:02.180 poets of the New York School, Black Mountain, and other revolutionary writers of the time.

00:04:06.660 di prima also co-founded the poets press and the new york poets theater and founded eidolon

00:04:14.300 editions and the poets institute she co-founded the san francisco institute of magical and healing

00:04:20.580 arts in 2009 she was named the poet laureate of san francisco after her mother passed dominique

00:04:29.780 di prima said the war is the war of the imagination right when you talk about the protests

00:04:36.460 and everything here and around the world.

00:04:39.200 That's what we were raised to do as children of Duprimas,

00:04:42.500 as children of Baracas, to be part of that change.

00:04:46.360 And it is about reimagining. 0.91

00:04:48.980 I mean, if you listen to Black Lives Matter,

00:04:51.400 and if you listen to poets, 0.99

00:04:53.380 it's about reimagining what we think we live like,

00:04:56.840 what we think people interact like,

00:04:59.040 and what we think policing is going to be.

00:05:01.400 the war is the war against the imagination

00:05:06.520 there is no way out of a spiritual battle

00:05:13.080 there is no way you can avoid taking sides 0.69

00:05:16.160 there is no way you cannot have a poetics

00:05:19.640 no matter what you do

00:05:21.080 plumber, baker, teacher

00:05:23.200 you do it in the consciousness of making or not making your world

00:05:28.020 This poem, Rant, became a rallying cry

00:05:33.660 along with de Prima's revolutionary letters 0.98

00:05:36.440 and Dominique describes young punks and trans people 0.54

00:05:40.560 and old hippies all showing up at her mother's house

00:05:42.960 for her 80th birthday

00:05:44.120 She describes a brave and profoundly inclusive person

00:05:48.900 As Amber Tamblyn wrote for their beautiful

00:05:52.140 and emotional obituary in The New Yorker

00:05:55.640 De Prima fought for queer rights, trans rights, and women's rights

00:05:59.080 long before clothing lines and hashtags began to flood political movements. 0.97

00:06:04.120 For six decades, her writing confronted the traditional stereotypes of the female body,

00:06:09.500 how it should look, weigh, and be desired.

00:06:13.300 She saw herself as a weapon to be deployed, no, detonated against her oppressors.

00:06:19.380 She wrote about the equality of the sexes. 0.52

00:06:21.860 she wrote about women as wolves women as predators as hunters as villains she wrote about fat women

00:06:28.880 queer women androgynous women disobedient women women as gods as birds as the wind 0.98

00:06:36.000 without knowing it i was missing this word witch historian witch publisher witch teacher witch 0.99

00:06:42.080 bisexual single mother witch who writes about the ways of light and there is a radiant flux 0.62

00:06:49.020 full electromagnetic spectrum of power and light lit in me now from her that I'm trying to shine

00:06:55.720 out here for you in case you are missing her too. Most especially, if you are Italian American,

00:07:03.840 if you were abused, if you are a mother, if you are queer, if you have been a seeker for the

00:07:10.160 hidden religions and the parts of history that don't make it into the canon, if you are a word

00:07:15.320 witch or a wolf witch or one with their ear to the wind with a sense that something's been missing

00:07:21.280 then my friend I believe this witch left her work in the world for you and in this circle which sound

00:07:28.620 makes between our ears coven I invite her in I want to tell a story in her honor and trace a sketch

00:07:36.640 of her thought a mask we might wear for a while to give ourselves a new light to our vision and

00:07:44.720 a taste of her power together we will put on the armor of her ideas and shriek and whisper

00:07:52.480 and sing in her words we have the right to make the universe we dream

00:07:57.600 witches we're back to talk about foxglove farm we love these subscription boxes subscription

00:08:08.340 boxes subscription boxes and how full of magic they are yeah recently you spoke once or twice

00:08:17.060 or a million times about um us being so lucky having found like soulmate collaborators in each

00:08:22.000 other soulmate editors and i think i would like to add foxglove farm to that list of soulmates

00:08:27.820 uh a soulmate sponsor who really is just like it's hard to be anti-capitalist and still like

00:08:34.280 eat food as we all know so it was really important for us to find a sponsor that was like ethically

00:08:40.340 sound or at least like in line with our values and sammy is like that and beyond yeah plus the

00:08:46.420 boxes are so cute and they support so many witches and so many artists it's just like a wonderful

00:08:52.640 little bit of self-care that is community care that you can do to go get yourself one of these

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00:09:01.800 get yourself yeah get yourself a monthly present and don't forget to use that offer

00:09:05.860 code missingwitches when you shop at foxglovefarm.com 0.98

00:09:09.240 i was never introduced to diane de prima four years of honors undergraduate english literature

00:09:18.240 a master's degree she just slipped by me until the day she died and i saw her lovingly mourned

00:09:25.000 and lionized by witches i adore and i went digging and it truly was like falling in love

00:09:30.120 and also falling into a world a wisdom a library this whole other canon reading her biography i

00:09:38.720 wrote down literally dozens of names for future missing witches episodes and her syllabus for a

00:09:44.180 class she created called hidden religions is so profoundly good if your interest is in the shape

00:09:50.200 of how we think and dream and the way ideas get buried and deleted and i think you are interested

00:09:56.620 in those things, aren't you, listener? Covenmate? Distant friend? This is what brings us here, I

00:10:03.080 think. Diane writes, if I am interested in anything with regard to that legacy, it is with overturning

00:10:11.280 its controlling lineages and traditions. The need to be positioned within a canon which was never

00:10:17.180 mine, either in my formation as a writer or in my presentation of myself. Listener, let this sink

00:10:25.820 into you you are of a peace with powerful poets overturning the very need the inherited and 0.99

00:10:33.960 enculturated need to be in a canon that was never ours she's flipping the tables in the fucking 0.95

00:10:40.300 temple with her work and her words and her presentation of self and it gives me such 0.96

00:10:45.160 electric joy to see her out ahead of us like this like a cleansing fire clearing a path

00:10:51.060 Di Prima grew up in an Italian family in New York

00:10:55.340 her grandfather introduced her to poetry, opera

00:10:59.240 and to Italian philosophers on the margins

00:11:02.260 writing about light as a unifying principle

00:11:04.780 trigger warning here, sexual abuse

00:11:09.380 her father abused her sexually

00:11:11.840 some of which she remembered very clearly 0.51

00:11:15.120 up until that very bad year

00:11:17.000 that she didn't remember at all

00:11:19.240 he introduced her to Machiavelli and a sense of nothingness and the true smell and feeling of

00:11:27.660 fascism she got away she went away to school and miracle and wonder she found a coven just an

00:11:34.720 incredibly powerful gang of teenage girls including and you're not going to believe this

00:11:39.880 but it's true Audre Lorde and they called themselves the branded a group of eight women

00:11:46.240 who met to practice telepathy, trance, and communications with the dead,

00:11:50.720 especially Keats and Shelley.

00:11:53.500 Di Prima later published Lorde's work in her poet's press.

00:11:56.660 She was determined to listen, in trance, or by publishing them herself,

00:12:01.680 to the voices she was longing to hear.

00:12:04.980 Her monumental life work of creation and collaboration

00:12:07.880 comes directly from that listening.

00:12:09.640 She wrote, there is some infallible mechanism in us,

00:12:13.420 something like a dousing rod of the heart.

00:12:16.240 And it moves in us sometimes, moves seldom, but with total authority.

00:12:23.180 That dousing rod of the heart moved in her, and she knew she needed to craft poetry,

00:12:28.000 because poetry itself was crucial magic.

00:12:31.520 She wrote, poetry is magic.

00:12:34.440 In the last years of this century, it seems clear to me that there is nowhere left for art to go than magic.

00:12:41.020 the suffusion of spirit, drawing down of God forms

00:12:44.380 or drawing down of particular energies or powers

00:12:46.980 with the will to make change.

00:12:49.360 This is what magic, this is what art is for.

00:12:55.080 There's nowhere left for art to go

00:12:57.360 than the drawing down of powers

00:12:59.180 with the will to make change.

00:13:02.660 That is what it's for. 0.81

00:13:07.120 Diane chooses to be a single mom 0.99

00:13:09.020 and to make family in this evolving, kaleidoscopic variety of beautiful shapes

00:13:14.240 that are also, for her, about crafting a new shape of what's possible

00:13:17.700 for women and for the world. 1.00

00:13:20.860 Dissolving illusory boundaries to make more space, more love, more energy, more everything.

00:13:28.540 Dissolving the fear of that everything with her fierce love of life itself.

00:13:34.860 In an interview with Jacket Magazine, DiPrima said,

00:13:37.360 I wanted everything very earnestly and totally I wanted to have every experience I could have

00:13:43.620 I wanted everything that was possible to a person in a female body and that meant that I wanted to

00:13:49.500 be a mother so my feeling was well as I had many times had the feeling well nobody's done it quite 1.00

00:13:55.820 this way before but fuck it that's what I'm doing I'm going to risk it so she crafts a beautiful new 0.99

00:14:03.180 family, while publishing books and gathering artists and following the dousing rod of her 0.99

00:14:08.320 heart to a poetic voice unlike any other, maybe because she was able to see and cherish love and

00:14:14.860 family shapes unlike others. I love and offer these three glimpses into their life.

00:14:21.820 This first one from Di Prima. In the early 1960s, after Ginsburg had returned from India wearing a

00:14:28.020 new beard, and many tales of his encounters with gurus. I was then presiding over a domain that

00:14:33.700 included a husband and three children, a theater, and innumerable writing projects.

00:14:40.120 Alan was frequently in and out of my house in those days, asking forthright questions as I

00:14:44.560 chased a baby down the hall. How was my sex life? Or settling in for the evening to lead us all in

00:14:50.380 sat saying. It was a time when we, all of us, cared about mantras. And second, this one from Robert

00:14:59.280 Wilson, bookshop owner in Greenwich Village, where Diana Prima would gather with writer friends and

00:15:04.240 where the first issues of Floating Bear were printed on a mimeograph machine. He wrote,

00:15:09.620 she was living at that time with her third husband, Alan Marlow, in a condemned building,

00:15:14.780 quite illegally, of course, in what is now called the East Village. Actually, it was on Cooper Union

00:15:20.600 Square, just a few houses south of the Cooper Union building. Diane was there not only with

00:15:26.380 her husband, but her three children from prior attachments, as well as an enormous number of

00:15:32.020 hangers-on, musicians, poets, various ex-lovers of her bisexual husband, and all too often simply

00:15:38.720 spongers. Virtually none of them had jobs or could in any way contribute money to the communal 0.80

00:15:43.960 establishment, but somehow Diane always managed to supply food and shelter for anyone who came

00:15:49.460 knocking at her door. Writer Ariel Gore in Bluebird, Women and the New Psychology of Happiness,

00:15:58.080 goes diving into DiPrima's biography, Recollections of My Life as a Woman, to share this story

00:16:02.880 of a night at Allen Ginsberg's in New York with Jack Kerouac, Philip Whelan, who were in town for

00:16:08.320 one of those nights with lots of important intense talk about writing you don't remember later.

00:16:14.700 Gore quotes DePrima and tells the story this way.

00:16:18.520 While Diane had promised her babysitter she'd be back at 11.30 that night,

00:16:22.380 and 11.30 starts rolling around, so Diane bids her farewells,

00:16:26.320 whereupon Kerouac raised himself up on one elbow on the linoleum

00:16:29.620 and announced in a stentorian voice,

00:16:32.200 DePrima, unless you forget about your babysitter, you're never going to be a writer.

00:16:37.980 I considered this carefully then and later, DePrima writes,

00:16:41.400 allowed that at least part of me thought he was right but nevertheless I got up and went home

00:16:47.440 I'd given my word to my friend she explains and I would keep it maybe I was never going to be a

00:16:53.960 writer but I had to risk it that was the risk that was hidden like a Chinese puzzle inside the other

00:16:59.260 risk of can I be a single mom and be a poet Gore continues a serious question that one serious not

00:17:08.080 only for moms, but for all of us. Can we be present in our relationships and still do the

00:17:13.760 work we feel called to do? It's like my friend Lynn says, a woman has to make a real effort 0.99

00:17:19.500 not to dissolve into everything that needs her. Looking back, DiPrima recognizes what

00:17:24.760 is true. Had she opted to stay that night, there would be no poems. That is, the person

00:17:30.040 who would have left a friend hanging who had done her a favor also wouldn't have stuck

00:17:34.520 through thick and thin to the business of making poems it is the same discipline throughout

00:17:39.880 gore writes we don't need children to be happy but motherhood has taught me this

00:17:45.880 to experience joy we have to be able to honestly experience darkness too

00:17:51.760 in responsibility to relationship we build bodies of memory and life experience that we can be proud

00:17:59.440 of. Motherhood has taught me that the opposite of happiness isn't struggle. It isn't even

00:18:05.920 depression. The opposite of happiness is fear and obedience. In revolutionary letters,

00:18:14.480 De Prima writes, be strong. We have the right to make the universe we dream.

00:18:21.620 No need to fear science, groveling apology for things as they are. All power to joy,

00:18:28.340 which will remake the world.

00:18:32.920 I feel so emotional reading that, I didn't expect it.

00:18:42.100 All power to joy.

00:18:45.520 Duprema's writing in life shows the lie

00:18:47.800 to the selfish solitary myth of individualism.

00:18:51.620 We were missing the context, 0.99

00:18:54.240 skipping not just the women and the kids and the queer family 0.96

00:18:57.240 and the sores and the chores in the woods, 0.99

00:19:00.140 but also skipping huge sections of work

00:19:02.580 in the lives of major thinkers,

00:19:04.360 thinkers who have been accepted and upheld

00:19:06.440 in these formal canons and pantheons

00:19:08.840 with kind of dusty sheets in the corners

00:19:11.620 thrown over the magical and uncomfortable pieces of their praxis.

00:19:16.240 Di Prima writes,

00:19:17.440 we're in the position that we've always been in with great minds,

00:19:20.740 of wanting to take part of the package and leave the rest,

00:19:23.960 like let's take Newton's law of mechanics

00:19:26.000 and forget his alchemy, let's decide that poor John D. was a great mathematician, but he must

00:19:31.800 have gone crazy when he started conjuring. And to just bring them into the light of day,

00:19:37.460 because I feel that we can't afford to go on ignoring that part of people's lives and work.

00:19:42.640 I think we're at the point where this magic or the spiritual or whatever you want to call it,

00:19:47.360 the part of ourselves that we have been keeping out of the spotlight because of being caught in

00:19:51.340 a few hundred years of rationalism civilization has got to come back into the work.

00:19:59.100 David Stephen Colony, author of Diane de Prima, Visionary Poetics in the Hidden Religions,

00:20:05.360 where a lot of these amazing de Prima quotes were pulled from, writes that de Prima also

00:20:10.620 conceived of this secret history of intellectual and spiritual evolution as essentially aimed at

00:20:17.020 human liberation, and believed anarchism, gender equality, communal property, and sexual freedom

00:20:24.480 were interlinked conceptions. So hold up and let's unpack this, because this is right at the beating

00:20:32.080 bloody heart of what interests me when I go looking for these ideas. It's the relationship

00:20:37.080 between human liberation, gender equality and inclusion, the freedom to love and celebrate

00:20:43.220 all consensual acts of joy and pleasure and communal property from common land, public

00:20:50.100 spaces, the land back movement and indigenous stewardship, even to movements in different

00:20:55.600 spheres like open source software and new regulatory ideas like housing first or basic

00:21:01.140 income or guaranteed livable income, the equitable distribution of wealth based on the shared

00:21:06.820 ownership and stewardship of resources, finally lifting the mind and body burden of this

00:21:12.940 death cult of late stage capitalism. I think these ideas are related to our project, which is

00:21:18.580 there is a connection here to our liberation and our power and a relationship too to the history

00:21:25.900 and heart of anarchy. In Occult Features of Anarchism, Erika Lagalice traces so many moments

00:21:32.820 where these revolutionary philosophies intertwine and de Prima would have been deeply versed in

00:21:37.880 Like Elise writes,

00:22:07.880 she was the reincarnation of Giordano Bruno.

00:22:11.480 And it was theosophy that inspired her fight

00:22:13.740 for home rule in India.

00:22:16.180 It was also through theosophy

00:22:17.940 that she met Jaharwal Nehru,

00:22:20.620 himself a member of the Theosophical Society.

00:22:24.220 Just as socialists were attracted to the occult,

00:22:27.100 spiritualists and mediums of all kind

00:22:28.960 who were disproportionately women

00:22:30.680 were led by their spiritual views

00:22:32.820 to engage the social question.

00:22:34.800 not all forms of anarchy harmonize with my own evolving personal philosophy but i do love this

00:22:42.700 shared history especially for women of political and spiritual thought and i love the idea

00:22:49.720 summarized in stanford's encyclopedia of philosophy that anarchists offer a positive

00:22:55.660 theory of human flourishing based upon an ideal of non-coercive consensus building

00:23:01.780 a communal flourishing based on independent choices woven together through consensus building

00:23:09.520 rather than coercion an idea that is fundamentally according to de prima interlinked with gender and

00:23:16.320 sexual freedom and the physical and existential need for communal property silvia federici includes

00:23:24.360 ritual under her beautiful tent of an idea of communal property some of our heritage stories

00:23:31.360 and our magic as well as our land needs to be liberated from the violent borders imposed by

00:23:36.280 the illusion of individual ownership for us to re-enchant and heal the world.

00:23:42.660 All of these concepts are linked into Prima's telling of a secret history,

00:23:47.100 what we might think of as the spiritual and material philosophy of missing witchcraft.

00:23:52.280 Diane thinks the work of nurturing and weaving those elusive seeds of ideas falls largely now

00:23:57.100 to women and I'd include all people of identities marginalized by that stifling web of patriarchy

00:24:03.620 capitalism and white supremacy for the same reason she outlines when she says

00:24:08.640 women are in the forefront of figuring out what it is to be human because I don't think the guys

00:24:15.920 have got the slightest handle on it yet I'm not mad at them for that I just think they're kind 0.99

00:24:20.340 of slow they've been caught by these structures they've been caught by the analytic way they've

00:24:26.000 been caught by all the things that make their male, white supremacist world work on a temporary

00:24:31.320 basis. They're in love with those things, so they're too slow to realize that there's endless

00:24:37.120 potential to the imagination, to the human emotions, and art is only interesting when

00:24:42.840 it's pushing at those boundaries. As Nancy M. Grace and Tony Trigiglio argue, Loba compels a

00:24:50.460 reader to consider the possibility that masculinist myths of culture, language, reason, and

00:24:55.560 immortality as well as aesthetics are acts not of knowledge but of ignorance and ego

00:25:00.660 repeatedly performed on the back of female silence, subjugation, and invisibility. 0.76

00:25:07.880 Di Prima seeks to find a path toward the mysteries of existence which cannot be approached

00:25:12.080 only through the analytic way but must be apprehended through the imagination, feeling,

00:25:17.960 and intuition. That's also from Coloni's Di Prima's Visionary Poetics and Hidden Religions

00:25:24.200 and at another point in that vast love

00:25:27.040 trio ties to her thought and work and life

00:25:29.380 they write

00:25:29.880 her decades long work on loba

00:25:32.400 should be understood as her effort

00:25:33.800 to redress the balance 1.00

00:25:35.080 to place the female principal

00:25:37.280 the goddess, the witch, the magna mater

00:25:39.700 the great mother

00:25:40.960 back in the primary role it enjoyed

00:25:43.040 before being dethroned by the male patriarchal god

00:25:46.080 with a large g

00:25:47.000 in prayer to the mothers

00:25:49.520 Di Prima invokes the mothers

00:25:50.800 who still perhaps dwell

00:25:52.120 in the depths of the earth or on some sacred mountain.

00:25:56.300 She seeks their intercession in our troubled world

00:25:58.900 and implores them to wake us like children from a nightmare, 0.95

00:26:03.040 give the slip to the devourers whom I cannot name, 0.92

00:26:07.020 the metal men who walk on all our substance, 1.00

00:26:10.620 crushing flesh to swamp.

00:26:13.260 Di Prima started writing Loba in 1971.

00:26:17.060 She was in her late 30s and had already lived

00:26:18.980 these different interwoven lifetimes,

00:26:21.200 including running a theater and a press publishing seven books raising five children traveling and

00:26:27.040 studying and teaching in the hidden histories and religions and all of that craft and life

00:26:31.720 gets baked into loba into this terse and somehow also vast multiverse of woman goddess wolf

00:26:38.880 identities loba begins by calling out to us

00:26:43.120 oh lost moon sisters crescent in hair sea underfoot do you wander in blue veil in green leaf

00:26:52.880 in tattered shawl do you wander with gold leaf skin with flaming hair do you wander

00:26:58.640 on avenue a on bleaker street do you wander on rampart street on fillmore street do you wander

00:27:05.920 with flower wreath with jeweled breath do you wander

00:27:09.920 Footprints shining mother of pearl behind you

00:27:13.840 Moonstone eyes in which the crescent moon

00:27:17.120 With gloves, with hat, in rags, in fur, in beads

00:27:21.260 Under the waning moon, hair streaming in black rain

00:27:25.320 Wailing with stray dogs, hissing in doorways

00:27:28.920 Shadows that you are, that fall on crossroads, highways

00:27:32.920 Jaywalking do you wander, spitting do you wander

00:27:37.300 Mumbling and crying do you wander 0.99

00:27:39.860 Aged and talking to yourselves 0.58

00:27:42.080 With roving eyes do you wander

00:27:45.000 Half quick love do you wander

00:27:47.340 Weeping you're dead

00:27:49.100 Naked you walk

00:27:51.200 Swathed in long robes you walk

00:27:53.760 Swaddled in death shroud you walk

00:27:56.560 Backwards you walk

00:27:58.100 Hungry, hungry, hungry

00:28:01.980 Here and everywhere I've looked so far

00:28:05.660 Her work seems like the poet's act of memory 0.99

00:28:08.580 this witch was looking for us 0.84

00:28:11.680 and she was out there 0.90

00:28:13.420 leaning into the wind

00:28:15.260 running her fingers through the grass

00:28:17.200 diving with her ink and stones

00:28:19.580 casting for a liberatory truth

00:28:21.820 she wrote

00:28:23.600 remember that all you need to remember

00:28:26.100 is what you love

00:28:27.060 remember to marry the world

00:28:30.020 Colony writes

00:28:33.180 she tells us that she conceptualized

00:28:35.400 her spiritual quest as involving

00:28:37.000 imminent supernatural forces dancing with light which shape human lives. The I Ching, the study

00:28:43.320 of magic, the awesome mystery of the universe which cannot be controlled or rationally understood but 0.96

00:28:48.320 only experience were defining aspects of her generation's conception of reality.

00:28:53.800 There is a sense of surrender here but not fatalism. What does that mean for you listener?

00:28:59.780 Surrender but not fatalism. Dancing with the light. There's something in here about the

00:29:06.980 ways we are able to use craft, I Ching, ritual, the physical making, and question asking to see

00:29:14.420 what's possible, which way the lines curve, and then choose our next step, casting us into new

00:29:22.060 light and into the next lift of melody. There's something so beat generation, so smoky basement

00:29:29.580 jazz improvisation about all this. But she makes it clear this potential isn't unique to her

00:29:38.000 generation. In her 80s, she explained, when the time came for me, I went out on the streets and

00:29:44.520 said what I had to say. Before that, we holed up and just talked about it among ourselves.

00:29:50.740 Remember, in the late 50s, there were maybe hundreds of us that could network across the

00:29:55.300 nation that's all hundreds yet we can make things happen and it changed the world

00:30:00.720 with the internet with all the new technologies that younger people have at their disposal

00:30:06.180 the opportunities for networking and sharing information and ideas there's so much more

00:30:12.320 that can happen now so we've got to be hopeful i'm optimistic in another poem of de prima is

00:30:19.240 dedicated to jazz pianist Thelonious Monk, she wrote

00:30:22.160 the stars are a memory system

00:30:25.860 for through them we remember our origin

00:30:29.420 our home is behind the sun

00:30:32.580 or a divine wind that fills us makes us think so

00:30:37.360 she is calling to the part of us

00:30:41.800 that hums when the wind blows

00:30:43.380 and her poems are that too

00:30:45.920 catching what she heard on her travels

00:30:49.400 not in the world, but throughout mind and dimension.

00:30:54.640 Towards the end of her life,

00:30:55.980 she indicated that she'd been aware of a choice

00:30:58.000 for the final years,

00:31:00.200 either to go through all her belongings,

00:31:03.060 books and notes,

00:31:04.360 and find all the poems to gather them up for the future,

00:31:07.700 to do the editing and shaping,

00:31:09.580 to help us make sense of all she'd seen,

00:31:12.360 or to keep traveling

00:31:13.740 and write it all down on whatever scrap was at hand.

00:31:18.720 Both choices are generous in their own right, but she chose the traveler.

00:31:23.820 So some of her work is still scrawled in the backs of books, waiting.

00:31:28.640 Her immensely complex and well-read philosophy is encoded in many sites.

00:31:33.280 It is a web all its own.

00:31:36.100 It's in her core syllabus for hidden religions,

00:31:39.260 in her semi-fictional autobiographies and semi-biographical novels and plays,

00:31:44.040 and perhaps most directly in her poems,

00:31:46.220 because for her they were a sight of pure magic

00:31:49.480 pulsing with light and seed and darkness

00:31:53.160 and the bloody fangs of wolves

00:31:54.840 and our own pleasure and hope

00:31:57.300 and a goddess riding the night

00:31:58.980 carving into the very edge of the stifling world

00:32:02.460 we have a right to make the universe we dream

00:32:06.420 we have a right to make the universe we dream

00:32:11.060 say it again to yourself

00:32:14.300 whisper and howl it into the night

00:32:17.580 we have a right to make the universe we dream

00:32:35.040 coven if you find you want more missing witches and this strange magic in your life

00:32:40.260 come grab a t-shirt at tpublic or one of the sweet black hoodies that i wear all the time

00:32:46.380 or get our book we poured our heart and brains and minds and all the magic we could find into

00:32:52.500 it we'd love to know what you think we'd love to read your reviews on amazon or goodreads and of

00:32:56.980 course the old rate review and subscribe means a lot and support our sponsor at fox club farm

00:33:02.240 using offer code missing witches thanks love you bye

Missing Witches - March 28, 2021

MW Diane di Prima - The War is the War for the Human Imagination

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