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
Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:
Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall
riprap of things:
Cobble of milky way.
straying planets,
These poems, people,
lost ponies with
Dragging saddles –
and rocky sure-foot trails.
The worlds like an endless
four-dimensional
Game of Go.
ants and pebbles
In the thin loam, each rock a word
a creek-washed stone
Granite: ingrained
with torment of fire and weight
Crystal and sediment linked hot
all change, in thoughts,
As well as things.
Gary Snyder
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.
Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.
This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.
— BY THEODORE ROETHKE
The scientists are in terror
and the European mind stops
Wyndham Lewis chose blindness
rather than have his mind stop.
Night under wind mid garofani,
the petals are almost still
Mozart, Linnaeus, Sulmona,
When one’s friends hate each other
how can there be peace in the world?
Their asperities diverted me in my green time.
A blown husk that is finished
but the light sings eternal
a pale flare over marshes
where the salt hay whispers to tide’s change
Time, space,
neither life nor death is the answer.
And of man seeking good,
doing evil.
In meiner Heimat
where the dead walked
and the living were made of cardboard.
His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o’clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.
— Eliot
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
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.