Because it’s not far down to Paradise and the canvas really can do miracles…
Or… in another more literal variation…
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Previous post: Strange Daze
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.
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
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
Gerard Van der Leun
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The only toon he ever did that I could put up with. Not bad, in a dozing in a hammock on a summer day, sort of way.
But you can’t talk about boomer sailing toonz without mentioning:
Cool Change
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bKwRW0l-Qk
and
Southern Cross
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bw9gLjEGJrw
Off topic, but I like the new goings on at your Ka-Ching!
I had a sail boat when I was young (in my forties). Twelve foot sloop rigged with too-small a centerboard. It was great exercise. It would turn turtle, I would jump in and right it… it would turn turtle, I would jump in and right it….
Thank you for this Gerard. The music takes me back to 1979 and the visuals made me laugh because I’ve always in my mind seen sails…and stretched canvases.
I recollect some documentary film shot in the early 70’s, Stills was on stage in a full length sleeveless fur coat. A man, an audience member, started ragging on him for being greedy, “plastic” (quite the insult then), and a sellout. IIRC Stills came down off the stage and might have gotten into the chest-bump thing with guy.
An aquaintence, a singer, related to a group of us what it was like walking into her mother’s living room on occasional mornings and seeing David Crosby’s whale-corpse-like form beached on the couch.
Time passed and I wondered if the reason there were so many CSNY revivals was no one else would hang around with them.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/510fe09885ac4f3c0719513c5d59b6083ebd8f9a92c11ac07ef57b9bb461c55f.jpg
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/510fe09885ac4f3c0719513c5d59b6083ebd8f9a92c11ac07ef57b9bb461c55f.jpg
Sailing. Yup, used to do that a lot. Crewed on various sailboats on Long Island sound and Chesapeake Bay, year round . Ocean racing on a 62′ yawl. Transatlantic on a 3-masted barque (twice). Gentle breezes to full gales. Great memories…the song remembers when.
Honeymooned in 1973 for two weeks on our Cape Dory 25’ sailboat. Chesapeake Bay. Nothing compares to sleeping, anchored, under the stars with the sounds of the halyards chinking against the mast. A general idea of heaven. I was 24 and just married to an “older” man of 33 I both loved, and, more importantly, liked. So yes to the song.
Missy sed: “I was 24 and just married to an “older” man of 33 I both loved, and, more importantly, liked.”
=========
Indeed. A lot of people never learn the diff no matter how many times they marry.
Charlie Anderson: Do you like her?
Lt. Sam: Well, I just said I…
Charlie Anderson: No, no. You just said you loved her. There’s some difference between lovin’ and likin’. When I married Jennie’s mother, I-I didn’t love her – I liked her… I liked her a lot. I liked Martha for at least three years after we were married and then one day it just dawned on me I loved her. I still do… still do. You see, Sam, when you love a woman without likin’ her, the night can be long and cold, and contempt comes up with the sun.
Did someone mention David Crosby and sailing?
https://youtu.be/VVxMnNN005s
Apropos to the 20th:
https://youtu.be/LJxXu8MdL-A
It was Crosby and whaling.
David Crosby may be an ass of epic proportions, but you kind of have to admire him. He *is* a very good musician, part of three legendary groups. He’s been living large since the mid 1960s. He’s snorted a pallet of coke, gotten knob jobs from ten thousand pretty girls, and still gets into the news whenever he wants. That utterly smug expression in the “family picture” when wazhername, the redhead singer who was as big a drunk as Dave, hired him to be the sperm donor for the singer’s wife to get pregnant. “Yeah, I’ve been overweight and addicted to everything in sight for my whole life, had to buy a new liver, and they STILL picked me as great DNA . . . .”
Sailing is a disease, I to thought it romantic thirty years ago, I still own three boats. What was once romantic, is now a quest for speed, I still race my Santana525, wed nights here, in our beer can league. Back,then it as the leisure fleet, anything that floats, I, drove a Coronado 25, a beast of a boat, designed for the rough waters off of , it’s name sake.
Although an older boat, my Santana 525, is a fast nimble boat, an A class racer. Not as nimble as the Express 27s, with her handicap, quite capable of winning. She’s a pocket racer, an open water jet. Capable of planing down wind.
I have two others I pleasure cruise, a Hunter 25, with a bobbed keel and an Oday 28 for weekend adventure, big ,very roomy atomic 4 inboard, with a huge complement on sails. The cabin is standup for folks 6.2 tall, sleek and nimble, capable of taking me around the world.
I recently sold my ocean boat, a Hallberg RASSY, 34, moored just south of Santa Cruz. A classic Swedish boat, with low sexy lines, built by sailboat masters. The Woodward was stunning, the craftsmanship Second to none.
She’s currently on an around the world adventure, with the young man I GAVE it to. With my med conditions my Dr’s,talked me out of that same around the world adventure. A pity really.
Dirk
Ghost, love your reference to Shenandoah. I loved that movie and met ‘the boy’, Phillip Alford back in the mid 60’s. He was a couple of years older than me, a nice cat and I believe he lives in MS or Alabama.
Sailboats….Dirk, I envy you. I’m not a racer, just a lover of all things sailboat. Several years ago before health issues, I restored and sailed a Pearson Ariel for a few years, inland. I sure learned a lot on that old sweetie and I really do believe that I’d leave everything I own, or that owns me, behind to take off on an extended offshore adventure. A 34′ Hallberg-Rassey…..damn!!
Dangit Boss! It’s around 14°F., the snow’s two feet deep, but after listening I might go out in the yard and do a little work on my Balboa 26.
I tented her in the fall so I can work under the snow, it’s a wee bit cold for painting but the swing keel winch needs some work I’ve been putting off.
Thank you for this, Mr. G. I have my own reasons for loving this song. Someone I loved — truly, madly, deeply — loved this song, too. And was a sailor.
@Jack, he was also in To Kill A Mockingbird, as Jem.