Colorized Colorado 120 Years Ago
Next post: I don’t write the headlines. I just report them.
Previous post: Long Read of the Week (So Far): “They Had It Coming”
WHEN in the course of human Events, it becomes necessary….
Welcome to the New American Digest: 2003-2020
Gerard Van der Leun
Even though a cloud’s white curtain in a far-off corner flashed
An’ the hypnotic splattered mist was slowly lifting
Electric light still struck like arrows, fired but for the ones
Condemned to drift or else be kept from drifting
Tolling for the searching ones, on their speechless, seeking trail
For the lonesome-hearted lovers with too personal a tale
An’ for each unharmful, gentle soul misplaced inside a jail
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
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
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
Reason will not decide at last; the sword will decide.
The sword: an obsolete instrument of bronze or steel,
formerly used to kill men, but here
In the sense of a symbol. The sword: that is: the storms
and counter-storms of general destruction; killing
of men,
Destruction of all goods and materials; massacre, more or
less intentional, of children and women;
Destruction poured down from wings, the air made accomplice,
the innocent air
Perverted into assassin and poisoner.
The sword: that is: treachery and cowardice, incredible
baseness, incredible courage, loyalties, insanities.
The sword: weeping and despair, mass-enslavement,
mass-torture, frustration of all hopes
That starred man’s forehead. Tyranny for freedom, horror for
happiness, famine for bread, carrion for children.
Reason will not decide at last, the sword will decide.
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
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.
Even though a cloud’s white curtain in a far-off corner flashed
An’ the hypnotic splattered mist was slowly lifting
Electric light still struck like arrows, fired but for the ones
Condemned to drift or else be kept from drifting
Tolling for the searching ones, on their speechless, seeking trail
For the lonesome-hearted lovers with too personal a tale
An’ for each unharmful, gentle soul misplaced inside a jail
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
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
Comments on this entry are closed.
Is this Crystal?
Now that I think of it, the road is too narrow for Crystal.
Similar to Telluride but I can’t place it
William Henry Jackson photo of Eureka Colorado
I wanna buy that first little place on the left, make it my new woodshop and architectural design center.
How much?
Attached link says the Sunnyside had electricity about 1889. Usually, the town had electricity only as long as the mine had the generator on…. generator operator went home, he turned the system off.
Dayum. It’s like you could walk into that picture.
(… it calls to mind memories of the novel, “Time and Again”, by Jack Finney. probably the best writer of melancholic stories in the mid-to-late 20th Century …..)
Hale Adams
Pikesville, People’s still-mostly-Democratic Republic of Maryland
Look! I can see Americans!
My first thought was the 1953 movie “Shane”.
The original black and white would put the realism back into that photo. Fake news, fake photos, fake everything now. Hollywood would love that colorized picture. Photoshop to hell.
This was colorized by the same person that did the downtown Saratoga Springs pik a week or so ago.
I like colorized pictures, although I also appreciate the sepia tones of the real oldies. Black and white (such as from my youth in the fifties & sixties) now looks harsh, but most of my color snapshots have faded badly, due to the dies and paper used in printing them.
This particular one is brighter than I can get on my own camera or phone (no filters), yet not as gaudy as most post-card pictures.
As for the theology of colorization, I think Peter Jackson gets it right in his WWI documentary, to wit, the colors are what the people themselves would have seen.
Trailer – movie is highly highly recommended if you get a chance to see it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrabKK9Bhds
AF, that’s pretty cool. I’m going to see if I can purchase the DVD.
I likes me some old black and whites, military, whatever. I have the whole Victory at Sea and Victory in the Air series. It’d be neat to have a “process” where they could be viewed in color. Color – the way the world really is, rather than black and white – an interpretation, brings it to life.
Was gonna guess Silverton, not too far off.