After all, I’m not making any money to speak of through the mail.
Next post: Newz U Kin Youze: UPDATE – The World is Burning!
Previous post: How We Live Now: The Calm Dog
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
FSA/8d22000/8d224008d22491a.tif
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
Van der Leun: The Normblog Bio of Your Host
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
Comments on this entry are closed.
At least that MF is honest.
They couldn’t find a transgender BIPOC to be the spokescritter?
I can’t remember the last time I heard so much truth in less than a minute and a half.
“Body by Zuckerberg”
That cracked me up. But there has to be a special name for this kind of laughter. It’s like the mirror image of schadenfreude.
JWM
What jmw said. Brings the truth.
Sooooooo true.
One of the very few drawbacks of living in a remote rural area is that we here have our choice of ONE ISP. Spectrum, and they SUCK. Really, really suck.
First 12 months- affordable and halfway reliable. After that, it doubled in price, and they started throttling. So I dumped the cable TV & internet package, and just went for internet- since I’ve got a Roku TV.
Then they jacked up the internet charges by 50%. Bastards…
Then they found out I use a VOIP phone (internet phone) instead of a landline, and said it “violated the contract terms” and would be charging me extra. So I lied, and told them I discontinued use of the VOIP phone, and they shut up about it. (I still use it!)
Recently, they mailed (and emailed) me this super-duper announcement that “my internet speed just DOUBLED, and at NO EXTRA COST!” WOW!
Except I tested it out, and the speed is the exact same. They lied. Bastards….
I really can’t complain too much, as I’m getting a gazillion TV stations, 1MB internet, and a home phone, all for $80.00 per month.
Spectrum still sucks, though.
Nice timing, yesterday I went with my girlfriend to see Comcast in the NE. I bought her streaming sticks for her two TV’s and we were returning the adapters that had connected them directly to cable.
She got the adapters a few years ago when Comcast began encrypting all the channels, that’s all the adapters do; they de-crypt the encrypted signal. When she initially installed (actually I did) the adapters they were ‘Free’.
A year later they suddenly weren’t ‘Free’ but $7.50 a month, each! So, two streaming sticks at $40 each, one time and there’s $15 bucks a month shaved off the bill.
But that’s about it, she’d get rid of the cable tv altogether but she loves watching the Hallmark channel, which doesn’t stream. This is why I’m wondering about the push to force Hallmark to make totally Gay and Transexual characterized movies, if they succeed then I think she’ll finally totally drop Cable TV.
Her new bill, with the $15 off, is $180/month. They pump it up any higher and maybe Elon Musk’s Starlink service might be something to think about. It already costs her more than either the electric or fuel bills. Which is really obscene if you think about it.
Oh, the wonders of American-style capitalism…
For John the River. I just looked on the internet and Roku has an offering called frndly.tv that says that they have the Hallmark channels live and several others for 5.99 a month. One time fee for the Roku and it streams quite well for me. The frndly folks say theu have a 3 day free trial, you can watch anything in the last three days anytime, and a cloud based DVR.
I cannot vouch for the service, but you might look into it. If you have already and it failed, sorry to have bothered you. I have commented a couple of times on here and been pilloried for making a simple suggestion. So, YMMV.
Good luck.