We of The Craft, Touched with Fire

‘ “We of the craft are all crazy,” remarked Lord Byron about himself and his fellow poets. “Some are effected by gaiety, others by melancholy, but all are more or less touched”; specifically the artistic voyage, seen as ‘a fine madness’ – the fierce energy, high mood, and quick intelligence, a sense of the visionary and the grand; a restless and feverish temperament – commonly carrying the capacity for vastly darker moods and energies, often interlaced with volatile or stormy emotional behaviour. When infused with the artistic genius temperament, can become a powerful imagination and a force of inner-workings, eccentric and extreme force.’

‘The aura of ‘mania’ endowed the genius with a mystical and inexplicable quality that served to differentiate him from the typical man, the bourgeois, the philistine, and quite importantly, the “mere” man of talent; it established him as the modern heir of the ancient Greek poet and seer and, like his classical counterpart, enabled him to claim some of the powers and privileges granted to the ‘divinely possessed’ and ‘inspired’.’ – from ‘Touched With Fire’, first published 1993 by Kay Redfield Jamison

“I am groaning under the miseries of a diseased nervous system; a system of all the others of the most essential to our happiness – or the most productive of our misery…. Lord, what is Man!
Today, in the luxuriance of health, exulting in the enjoyment of existence; In a few days, perhaps in a few hours, loaded with conscious painful being, counting the tardy pace of the lingering moments, by the repercussions of anguish, and refusing or denied a Comforter.
– Day follows night, and night comes after day,
only to curse him with life which gives him no pleasure”
– Robert Burns

I,I,I. (Native american songs and a free write)

‘I rise, I rise,

I, whose tread makes the earth rumble.

I rise, I rise,

I, in whose thighs there is strength.

I rise, I rise,

I, who whips his tail when in rage.

I rise, I rise,

I, in whose humped shoulder there is power.

I rise, I rise,

I, who shakes his mane when angered.

I rise, I rise,

I. whose horns are sharped and curved.’

-These are the lyrics of a song from the Osage Indian American tribe,
called; ‘The Rising of the Buffalo Men’.
I also found this, although the origins are unknown to me.

‘I have spirits,
Spirits have I,
My Spirits
Are like birds
and the wings
and bodies are dreams
I have spirits,
spirits have I.
I,I,I.’

Soon after I started writing my own! If you don’t know me or my steez,
I’m an explorer of my language, and the cultures of the world.
Inspired by the upward, the positive. Here’s my free write,
inspired by Indian American culture.

As a keeper of harmony,
I pledge the earth, my heart
and everything I stand for –
the vital energy of
the passions of youth, of
the voices of elders, the vital
energy in which built my bodymind ark, and life
force without which I am but an echo in chant;
A celestial being in a vessel of effervescent resonance.
If I open my heart to the whole universe
I wonder who will answer first,
but usually I’m just drifting alone,
like a shadow in a blizzard, I’m screaming into a storm.