Let’s go surfing now / Everybody’s learning how / Come on a safari with me:
Let’s go surfing now / Everybody’s learning how / Come on a safari with me:
from EAST COKER — Eliot
Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.
NEW Real World Address for Complaints, Brickbats, and Donations
Beneath the Aegean
When all Earth’s seas shall Levitate,
Dark shawled within the skies,
Upon our eyes will Starfish dance
Their waltz of Blind surprise.
The sun will Rise within wine Dark
As Argonauts imbibed,
Whose drunken arms embrace that sleep
Where Phaeton’s horses Stride.
Upon all of Earth’s wind-sanded shores,
As dolphins Learn to soar,
All we once were on the land
Shall be sealed behind the door
Of Ivory and Chastened Gold,
That the Mystery solved complete
Shall never til the seas’ Long fall
Wake mariners from their sleep.
— Van der Leun
Your Say
Song of Myself
I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this
air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their
parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.
— Walt Whitman
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
— The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T. S. Eliot
SPRING
Search American Digest’s Back Pages
My Back Pages
WEEGEE
The Vault
My Back Pages
Real World Address for Donations, Mash Notes and Hate Mail
Comments on this entry are closed.
Stupid government bureaucracy!
I’ve been watching the Facebarf posts on this. The Fox News feed comments are overwhelming horror at people not “social distancing”, “they’re all gonna get sick and die, and they deserve it”, “selfish people not thinking of others” “Idiots not following THE RULES” “Who do these people think they are to want to WALK ON THE FUCKING BEACH?”
… repeat until you want to puke your guts out.
These far outnumber those comments in support of quaint concepts like freedom.
Weeks of being forced indoors staring at the fear mongering coming across the TV set has done what a foreign army could never accomplish. The masses are conquered. They’re terrified sheep, bleating out what their TV masters have told them to. The police obey the commander who obeys the commie puke in Sacramento. See them on their horses and motorcycles standing just like the goddamn gestapo in the face of citizens who want to commit the crime of walking on the beach.
I fear we are well and truly fucked as a culture, fucked as a people, fucked as a nation. And we have been for a very long time. This just ripped the mask off it.
This is now post-America. Your country ain’t coming back.
JWM
Cowards using horses on the hot asphalt to do their blockade dirty work. Time for God t9 clean house.
My sister rants for me.
https://www.facebook.com/malindamchenry1/videos/10158555247984155/
It’s a 26 minute rant about the governor of Kansas extending the lock down of businesses that are not essential. Malinda is in fine form. She can shoot lasers from her eyes, she’s so mad. She’s a nonessential business. She said, “I am OPENING my business on Monday, May 4th, and here is the address, and you can come and try to arrest me.”
New post on this topic in City Journal titled “The Trust Deficit”: “Faced with disaster, authorities often worry more about an unruly public than about the crisis at hand.” The author uses the term elite panic “to describe cases where distrust of the public leads authorities to enact heavy-handed measures during crises.”
As Gerard would say, RTWT.
https://www.city-journal.org/disasters-authorities-trust-deficit
Jewel:
That was epic! I shared it on my own timeline.
JWM
While the trust deficit article that PA Cat links to is interesting, the “unruly public,” is, at this time, I think, a minority amongst minorities. Case in point. I’m in Michigan, and while there have been rallies against Half-Whitmer’s fascist executive orders, I was just out and about at a liquor store (a man cannot be without bourbon), a garden center, a Lowe’s, and a local chain grocery store. Ninety percent of the individuals out buying things I saw were wearing masks. This fact does not indicate an “unruly public,” but just the opposite. Certainly, I think, people are getting restless in regards to the lockdowns inflicted on them, but in large part, the spoon fed uncertainties still being thrown around in the MSM, abetted by the likes of Fauci and the WHO regarding the Chinese bat flu, are maintaining a sheeple response from the public. Is there a chance for an unruly public? Maybe, but I do not see it changing from a minority of individuals, to a majority of individuals being unruly. I think the majority of people are such cowed sheeple they will bow down to the state’s rules until such time they are given an all clear signal.
I find it interesting that a headline talking about experts predicting a possible worst case scenario gets turned into “there WILL be a worse case scenario” in people’s brains, so that not only do they accept any and all limitations on their freedom, but they want to call the police on any obvious anarchist leaving home without a face mask and a tape measure to enforce social distancing. The journalists are aware of this phenomenon, and they keep feeding it.
Planning my trip to HB next. Where is Eric von Zipper? Buddy Hackett? Better yet, Gidget?
@Casey: RatRod Riders B/C is the closest you’ll find. I got Von Zipper’s role down cold. Next Saturday we ride down there come hell or whatever.
JWM