Is still on the line…
![In the Kingdom of FEMA [November, 2018]](https://americandigest.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/AAPARADISETREASURE.jpg "In the Kingdom of FEMA [November, 2018]")
Next post: With three you get eggroll… made with 60 eggs
Previous post: Beyond Macavity: Cat Tales by AD Readers
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
Comments on this entry are closed.
SUPERB!!!!
I don’t know what Art is, but I know what I like. This Jimmy Webb song is one of his (many) great songs. And Glenn Campbell is one of the many under-appreciated singers of the past many years — and an incredibly talented guitarist (see YouTube).
It’s sad, though, to have seen how Tinsel Town Culture ate him up (not unwillingly) and spit him out. People will insist on wanting to be A Rock & Roll Star, because if “in a week or two if you make the charts the girls will tear you apart” . . .
Well, the world runs on Money and Pussy, and not necessarily in that order.
One of the greatest guitarists of all times.
Listened to that song on Armed Forces Radio in War Zone C. It was haunting, still is
The beauty of this song lingers even though Glen Campbell has left us.
Besides his beautiful voice and great musical taste, Mr. Campbell could pick guitar (as Klaus says above). He was a member of the “Wrecking Crew”, a group of session players who actually played the recorded top 40 music in LA in the 1960s and 1970s. Glenn played guitar in the studio before he became a pop star.
My poor daughters are getting exposed to old guy music, including (but not limited to) Glenn Campbell, Jerry Reed, Mac Davis, Roy Clark, et al. No auto-tune (digitally adjusting the pitch of singers who can’t get into the same area code as the actual note). No pocketing (digitally adjusting the beat of the music).
What a wonderful start of my day! Glen Campbell, a true Patriotic American!
Heckuva singer, too!
Second stanza is one of the most deeply affecting in all of pop history. Gave me chills as a kid, and I didnt even know what half of it meant
Some commenter on this site once described GC as being in a group of one. I agree wholeheartedly.
We needed his music then; those were fukn hard times (Vietnam, Nixon, inflation, economy, social upheaval).
Here’s a Toby Keith song. Not in the same category, and loosely the same genre, but this song did strike me this morning. Don’t want to bruise the thread, but take it for what it is: a fresh song about America.
https://youtu.be/BoZftznHz7o
Thread unbruised and a new item born.
Jimmy Webb’s inspiration for the lyrics came while driving through Washita County in rural southwestern Oklahoma. At that time, many telephone companies were county-owned utilities, and their linemen were county employees.
Heading westward on a straight road into the setting sun, Webb drove past a seemingly endless line of telephone poles, each looking exactly the same as the last. Then, in the distance, he noticed the silhouette of a solitary lineman atop a pole. He described it as “the picture of loneliness”. Webb then “put himself atop that pole and put that phone in his hand” as he considered what the lineman was saying into the receiver.
It was a splendidly vivid, cinematic image that I lifted out of my deep memory while I was writing this song. I thought, I wonder if I can write something about that? A blue collar, everyman guy we all see everywhere – working on the railroad or working on the telephone wires or digging holes in the street. I just tried to take an ordinary guy and open him up and say, ‘Look there’s this great soul, and there’s this great aching, and this great loneliness inside this person and we’re all like that. We all have this capacity for these huge feelings’.
Campbell said “When I heard it I cried…It made me cry because I was homesick.”
“one of those rare songs that seems somehow to exist in a world of its own – not just timeless but ultimately outside of modern music”
@ghostsniper, that is a brilliant quote. It absolutely captures the beauty and power of the song — one of a handful of PERFECT tunes recorded in history.