Frey Speaks Through Me

O come, Frey, speak through me, speak through my life and its yearnings, speak through my failures and the texture of my own striving soul, which longs for the life uprising whose glorious insurrection of spring you foster ; speak, O harvest-king beyond the gates of ever-winter ; speak O Frodi who has known the icy dungeons but who learned to raise the flag of liberation against the giant tyrants, vowing all would be freed by your hands ; speak, for I shall listen, and share thy holy, fellow Gods of light and rush and glory serving, voice :

Life is the glorious opportunity to participate in change. It is the privilege to hold the torch and set hearts afire, to thaw the ice of winter and inaugurate the spring, even foment the summer. Yet I am surrounded by men of ice. The divine impulse towards enlightenment and revolution, life as dynamism and evolution, has been held under frozen glaciers. I have adapted my life to the sons of glaciers. I have lived in winter with no sign of palpable resistance. I have had my inner fire diverted, at times just to keep myself warm from the flurries. I have failed, O, I have failed to fully serve life. I have squandered my opportunity to be a brand amongst the frost. I have listened to the lies against the flames. I have forgotten that Love herself rides upon the panthers burning bright in the forests of the night. Who will forgive me? When you are dead, all is done, but while you live, if you do live, you have power and glory to stir the changes of the ages, and join up with cadres of evolution, enlightenment, and social-idealist dynamism, fomenting provocation and vitality by spreading seeds of utopian possibilities realizable in this moment. O, that is to be alive! So who shall forgive me for not living? I weep, I am encased in Arctic freeze, even my tears become icycles. If I do not set free, if I do not thaw the winter and welcome in the spring, why do I live? Why do I live at all? But then if I don't, I do not live. I am only preserved, frozen, held crystalline and caged. O for an age of spring! O for the warmth of summer!

I have betrayed the revolution. I have neglected the revolution. I have not known how to tend the garden of revolution. I have lived on the wrong side of history. I've been surrounded and engulfed by bourgeois living-death. I have lived in vain.

I have allowed snowmen to tell me the torch within and abroad about in the world that might return spring is "too extreme". I have let those whose interests lie in ice surround me with their paranoia towards thawing ; O, how they fear the rapid, rushing mountain streams of spring for "running too fast"! O yes, ye glaciers, they do run too fast for ye, do they not? The exhilaration of their life-rejuvenating surges and streams overwhelms your frozen hearts. "Change, perhaps, but all at the right pace." So say the sons of glaciers, for whom millennia are too quick to bring us spring. How long have the flowers of the spirit's blossoming waited cold and neglected beneath the snow, yearning for the warmth of the sun to awaken the flow of beautiful water from its sleep? If those living amongst flames so hot they burn up all and spoil the living, vital alchemy were to be advising moderation, in service of that alchemical dynamism, I'd be more prone to listen. But I am surrounded by the ice-stupefied, by lives made slumber by the cold, by lockdown and rigidity that fears the refreshing flows of May, and then wonder why they don't feel alive, wonder why they must plunder the world like flesh-cold vampires for fresh blood just to feel what blood is again! Or even those who, bless their hearts, have children to bring youth and wild stirring of radical aliveness back in the world, yet think nothing to raise such harbingers of spring in icy dungeons of cynicism that will encroach and slowly surround their warmth till it is snuffed, and then, denizens of the frost themselves, blue flesh and blood barely beating, they too shall yearn for kids, just to remind them what fire is at all. They will play with matches, but light no fires, spread no bonfires! They will light matches and watch till the cold winds blow them out, then light more, never thinking of kindling the world to set all aglow, that matches might come into greater lights of living fire! O birds longing for younglings, build your nests first, in the warm boughs of a coming spring, and sing that you might call the sun forth to do her holy work of thaw!

Then the monsters of ice have other strategies to divert and refreeze impulses of life. They direct the revolutionary energy of a lone warrior, which aims at serving the spirit of alchemical dynamism, and radical evolutionary catalysis, into dead and dreary militarism, soldiers of frost, their warrior spirits held on ice, sent out to plunder more for the barren souls back home, who committed against the sun, yet desire to eat. And woe, the evolutionary light snuffed out in such a soul, putting force to the service of frost, spreading glaciation throughout the world through sheer brutality, and wanting a hero's celebration for their slavery called soldiery!

I have lived in a country which has frozen the slogans of living flame, and raised them as idolatrous banners in some cargo cult, as if speaking the word "warmth", but opposing all warmth, would warm, or crying "freedom" again and again, while continually locking down would bring any liberation! But the cargo cult, the useless slogan-celebration whereby the ignorant glory in their enlightenment and the frozen congratulate themselves for their sparks of life, serves the frost giants who lord it over all the rest and ensure that glaciation remains the norm. A thousand thousand sheets of printed ice, all droning the same perspective, the same commitment to winter and the same paranoia to spring (let alone hysteria about summer itself!), with variation being merely an argument between January and February, with March seeming radical, but April and May beyond the pale of any thinkability whatsoever, and then calling itself the freest press in the world! It calls its plunder stolen from the shivering masses of the world "wealth", then wonders when peasants longing for laughter of that spirit of summer's harvest raise hoe and pitchfork against their icicle-puppeteers! And when I have dared to even listen to the salt of the earth who pray to summer gods, in this climate I am looked on with eyes of suspicion, I "go too far". Fools! I go not far enough! Nor have I ever! You plant graves in the snow and call them homes, you build refrigerator-fortresses and call them institutions, you ply the same, tired drone of slumber and call it knowledge. You geld the rams of wisdom, then think yourselves bold for the brutality of your emasculations. Your archives, not temples of heirloom seeds awaiting felicitous distribution, but freezers making sure the longings of the dead stay dead; and when an archive-keeper seeks to spread the holy seeds, and become a priestess again, rather than a mortician, you pull the funds and dry up the ice as ye do so well!

Yet my ears are alive to the cries of peasants ; I listen to the earth beneath the snow and know it is more womb than tomb (and O, if you would live, even tomb could be womb!) ; my senses stretch out beyond the howl of winds and blizzards to catch the murmurs of the land-folk and the worshippers of the blossoms, and yea, even their anger is holy! O their anger is a warmth which thaws! For there are, as a firebrand and prophet said, glaciers to melt! The white peaks still encircle me, lying about their eternity, yet I will dare to hear the distant birdsong that speaks the coming of May! And patriots of frost, you will cry extremist, you will cry radical, in paranoia perhaps you may cry sympathizer with terrorists (you lie, you looming, brutal columns of life enterrored under weight of snow!) ; while I shall cry, life! Life! Life!

And this cry of life is worship, for even your religions are idolatry to blocks of ice! Would you freeze living powers of holiness in the world, and then bowing before their carbon-frozen monoliths, think yourselves spiritual? Is there anything you will not turn into a lie? Is there any butterfly you will not pin to your ice-sheets and stare before its lifeless form and call it beautiful?

And ye denizens of March, who think yourselves progressed beyond your committed comrades of January and February, do not speak to me of your vague hopes, your relentless devotion to inching January 1st to the 5th, or even ides ; your pale longings for progress and peace ; your cowered and bled yearnings for mere March's end, ye April's Fools, unless you will raise your torch for spring itself! Do not "hope" for warmth but shy from torches! Do not dream in slumber of "change" but gild the cages with plastic flowers, however "lifelike", yet stay faithful to tragedy. No more tragedians! Strong laughter is needed ; comedy melts with mocking humor the monoliths of ice, and turns all struggles and hard reversals of fortune forward, towards the wedding of the May-bride! All tragedies end in death ; all comedies turn tragedy towards the spring and end in weddings. Don't ask for love and remain a tragedian. Don't faintly wish for spring but weave beautiful, pathetic garlands of ice crystals to hang around the necks of the broken as consolation! Cease to console, and dare to renew! But if you would, in an age of ice, ye must set hearts aflame, and fear not to be thought a brand! Fear it? Glory in it! Then you too may be a harbinger of the returning sun! Then you may rise from wilting, where you paen the faded purple of your petals to make them seem the veritable pulsing blood of Adonis, and actually rise, stem erect again or for the first time, and give your elfin gifts to the lords and ladies of life! Such is true worship ; such is true art. No progress without the will to turn the wheel, and risk the roulette's gamble. You will not be saved through safety but through daring. And never be afraid to make mistakes, nor to admit them! For failing is how we learn to love life further, and confession of sins against the revolution that is life's dynamic alchemy of enlightenment and evolution is the first step towards forgiveness. The spring will always welcome you back --- so long as you still live and will commit what blood remains pumping in you towards her rescue from the clutches of frost. It is no allegory to say everything, but everything depends on this, and never, even when shivering, forget it. Don't pray for May but turn away from Robin Hood. Don't beg for Bride then leave her in the ice. Rouse up, O friends of inspiration! Seize the refreshing toil of the march across the tundra to open the gates of spring! For then love and joy shall blossom as you have never known.