WHEN in the course of human Events, it becomes necessary….
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Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice.
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress.
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountains start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
– – WH Auden
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
As if I had just woken from all water into dream.
— Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, 1973
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The steel mill sky is alive.
The fire breaks white and zigzag
shot on a gun-metal gloaming.
Man is a long time coming.
Man will yet win.
Brother may yet line up with brother:
This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.
There are men who can’t be bought.
The fireborn are at home in fire.
The stars make no noise,
You can’t hinder the wind from blowing.
Time is a great teacher.
Who can live without hope?
In the darkness with a great bundle of grief
the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps, the people
march:
“Where to? what next?”
— Carl Sandberg
Down valley a smoke haze
Three days heat, after five days rain
Pitch glows on the fir-cones
Across rocks and meadows
Swarms of new flies.
I cannot remember things I once read
A few friends, but they are in cities.
Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup
Looking down for miles
Through high still air.
BY GARY SNYDER
Starry-eyed an’ laughing as I recall when we were caught
Trapped by no track of hours for they hanged suspended
As we listened one last time an’ we watched with one last look
Spellbound an’ swallowed ’til the tolling ended
Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse
An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
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That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
– – W. B. Yeats, 1865 – 1939
Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly;
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained
thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems.
— Robinson Jeffers
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
As if I had just woken from all water into dream.
— Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, 1973
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An amazing sight!
I was to be in NYC in about a day or 2 from now, but that didn’t happen.
I watched the Chief of Engineers, US Army, on Fox News tonight. He was in full war mode. In charge, and taking the initiative. I told my family about 4 days ago that the military (I probably said the army) is going into activation mode: reserves and NG call ups, and recalls of retired and Individual Ready Reserves ( one step out of the reserves and still on a roster ). War, in other words.
It went without fanfare yesterday that POTUS signed the EO to permit DOD to bring active up to enough reservists to fill the active ranks to a million personnel. It was a few days before that that he authorized NG call-ups by state governors. At the same time, volunteers among retired medical specialties were called. A friend of mine who used to be a bird colonel is headed back to work now, from the retired ranks.
Mayor De Blasio made the idiotic mistake of calling his guardsmen “not military”. I am sorry to say that the political class in our country are sub-caliber sonsabitches. It scares me to imagine the idiocracy who now lead us.
The sailors on this ship, and the one that just sailed past the USS Iowa into berth in LA (Mercy), are head and shoulders better than the mayors of our big cities. I’d put a CPO up against De Blasio any day. God bless the US military.
Not only the US military. The British Army is doing much of the work fighting the virus in Britain, too. Everything from transporting supplies to building temporary hospitals to treating patients.
It’s notable that many in almost equally critical, but heavily unionised, jobs (train drivers on the London Tube and dustbin collectors, for example) are leaving work in droves. Which could have been predicted; that sort of job attracts skivers.
Casey sed: “It scares me to imagine the idiocracy who now lead us.”
=========
Indeed.
There seems to be little to no “leading” going on.
Men, stand up and jump right in and get shit done.
But there are very few men any more, instead, mostly wimmen no matter which gender they claim.
Lots of old lady hand wringin’ and little gurl bawling. This is the result of 40 years of attempting to make men irrelevant in all ways.
But we’re still out here and we are getting it done, in spite of the Mt McKinley size obstacles. It might just take a little longer. But it WILL get done. 1 man = 10 of anybody else.
Ghostsniper said it well.
Those points are correct and significant. I made this observation elsewhere:
Thank you for committing those points to writing. Thank you for getting that word of work and dignity out to many who do not organically understand it. Sadly there are too many who do not, and many of those are people of strong influence and persuasion.
Piss on them. Every last one of them and their delicate sense of self-importance, furrowed brows and all. Piss on them.
Turn the stupid TV off and leave it off.
And welcome to the redneck world of getting it done, making it work, Making do, suffering in silence, cussing about it, and doing it all over tomorrow. Scars and calluses. Tools. Engine exhaust. Dirt and sweat.
And by redneck I include all the ghetto, gang, single mom, single dad, unloved, discarded, misunderstood, and ignored. Black Americans, mixed, oriental, indigenous, Latin, mutt, doesn’t matter. Redneck.
Point your finger and place it in the middle of your chest. That’s the person who is going to make things survivable if not make things better. Start small if you have to and help those within reach, take care of your own, don’t do stupid stuff, and improve the things and the life surrounding you.
It is good to be Redneck.
On capital “L” leadership:
Leaders tell their people, “you can do this” and then show them how to do it. They LEAD.
The assholes in charge these days only know how to say “you are required to do this” and then poke with bayonets. I don’t have to tell you what that is.
Thus endeth the lesson.
My brother lives in NYC. His FB page is a long string of posts and memes, all of the most vicious Trump hate he can find. I find it most ironic that the most hated man in Manhattan has come to to rescue their wretched asses.
JWM
@Dan Patterson-
“Piss on them.
Turn the stupid TV off and leave it off.”
I am in 100% agreement with you Sir. Turn off the TV and disconnect the power cord. Throw it in the dumpster and be a free man.
It’s good to see the USNS Comfort entering New York harbor. Let us pray that this Chinese Virus pandemic will not come to mean “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.”
Leadership. I think it was Buck Sexton, on the radio yesterday, who points out that dems say stoopidshit like “I want a thousand generators here!” and have no idea where, who, or how that would happen. They say an order into space; into thin air. Trump is exactly the opposite of that. He knows the logistics, and in that regards he knows the logistics in many fields important to our current crisis.
Sexton said the former way, the dems way of bloviating orders, is very Soviet in style. “I want 10 million bushels of wheat in Belarus next month!” No fukn idea how. Not even growing season. You just starved the farmers and truck drivers to death last winter. That’s our democraptic leadership in states and big cities. be really, really wary of those assholes. Be the sergeant whose new LT just stepped off the truck with starched fatigues and rosy cheeks: tell the dem leadership, with tact (sarcastic tact/ military style tact) that what they say is usually horseshit, and that the good governor, mayor, or city councilman can sit in the corner and let the men handle it.
Dangerous days we’re in.
I ain’t saying it didn’t happen, because I am reliably informed that it DID happen, but I find it strange that not a single one of the many clips I have seen of USNS Comfort entering NY Harbor SHOWS the fireboats giving her the traditional water cascade salute. I wonder, is this a sly little media poke in the eye, after President Trump made some of their heroes like Ms. Rachel (Nevada) Madcow look like idiots?