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WHEN in the course of human Events, it becomes necessary….
Welcome to the New American Digest: 2001-2022
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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Maybe the Lord had to do something drastic to save us from ourselves after we screwed up the real world in the Garden? It’s a proposition that has always made sense to me. The Scripture does indeed claim that someday a very real “Great Reset” will be the final reality.
The Second Coming of Christ indeed will be the true Great Reset. On that day, do we have any wonder what the world elites will do? On that day, all will go on their knees—some through joy, some through terror.
In Hinduism there is the concept of “Maya”.
“Maya connotes a magic show, an illusion where things appear to be present but are not what they seem”.
This is what we are living through these days. Nothing that once constituted sources of authority, be those the media, government proclamations or the academy, bears any relation—except by accident—to reality. Their goals are to redirect, to misinform, to obscure, to confuse. To speak the truth has itself become a crime.
Naturally this cannot go on forever. This entire shambolic construct will one day come to its end. Due to the nature and mentalities of those in power, this end will be violent—perhaps extremely so. Between truth and lies there can be no compromise, no gray areas, no nuance, no half measures. Darkness will never surrender, any more than a cancer will surrender.
“Para eliminar la rabia, hay que matar el perro.”
Prepare. And choose wisely.
Yes Mike…. There is no hope in a world of death for the humanists. Their god of scientism is nothing more than a fickle bitch. Artificial intelligence and the post modern sorcery of gene therapy is nothing but the same nonsense as Ponce De Leon’s dream of the fountain of youth. Every knee will bend.
Instead of attempting to listen to millions of philosophical lies, truly intelligent people should be seriously contemplating the simple proposition presented in “Pascal’s wager”.
I believe I’m responsible for us, not anybody else. I believe the choices I made twenty thirty years ago to begin our journey into preparedness, was exactly what was in our best interests. I believe God gave us each Reason/ Logic, to make informed choices.
I’m not counting on another living soul outside my klan to get thru.
I trust my dog Daisy, my cat Ellie more then most people.
I’m daily amused at folks who are not charting their own course, but allowing others to dictate your future. Bad shits coming, it is our own Govt i despises, I don’t trust. They’ve proven themselves to be liars cheaters, communist.
Theirs a storm coming. Your going to need more then a rain coat.
I second everything you wrote. If a man remains unprepared after all that has happened in the past few years, his survival depends solely upon luck. And luck is in short supply among those blind, oblivious and ignorant to events around them. Men cannot afford to be careless.
I put my faith in God, my friends and associates, and mister Smith and mister Wesson. And there the list ends.
I’ve long contended that blaming anyone else for just about anything that happens to you is a big mistake. As soon as you do so you’re given up control, it’s they fault, their actions, so you can’t do anything but cry about it.
If instead of whining about what they, whoever, did, you think about what you could have done or can do to change the situation, you then understand the control of your life, your world, is yours, your alone, not in their hands.
Keep that in mind, and as Ol’ Remus, RIP, said over and over, avoid crowds, and you’ll be right.
Every terrible thing that happened in my life is because of…me. It has only been by the Grace of God that I am not in prison or dead.
Amen Mike, but I’ve seen that we each have the ability to place ourselves in positions of luck. We make our own luck, based on knowledge and logic.
Luck, Karma, Insight, one has the ability to make it happen often, but not always! Luck can often be a gift from god
Those are blessed moments.
If not you, then who?
Twas ever thus.
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