Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice.
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress.
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountains start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
– – WH Auden
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
As if I had just woken from all water into dream.
— Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, 1973
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The steel mill sky is alive.
The fire breaks white and zigzag
shot on a gun-metal gloaming.
Man is a long time coming.
Man will yet win.
Brother may yet line up with brother:
This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.
There are men who can’t be bought.
The fireborn are at home in fire.
The stars make no noise,
You can’t hinder the wind from blowing.
Time is a great teacher.
Who can live without hope?
In the darkness with a great bundle of grief
the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps, the people
march:
“Where to? what next?”
— Carl Sandberg
Down valley a smoke haze
Three days heat, after five days rain
Pitch glows on the fir-cones
Across rocks and meadows
Swarms of new flies.
I cannot remember things I once read
A few friends, but they are in cities.
Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup
Looking down for miles
Through high still air.
BY GARY SNYDER
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
Van der Leun: The Normblog Bio of Your Host
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
– – W. B. Yeats, 1865 – 1939
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
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
As if I had just woken from all water into dream.
— Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, 1973
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Just another day at the office….. Awesome !!
Awesome video! What does he keep looking at to his left? Can you imagine how much you would miss that kind of flying after you get discharged? – there is no civilian equivalent!
When I was young I was going to get my degree in physics, join the Navy and fly like this guy and then become an astronaut. I was a young kid living on Merritt Island, FL and everything around me was about space.
Well, that didn’t work out so well. I didn’t finish my physics degree, didn’t join the Air Force or the Navy and didn’t apply to NASA to be an astronaut (though I did work at KSC for 27 years as a contractor on computers). I finished my degree in forestry and really loved that.
Some years later I took private flying lessons and learned the main reason why I should never have been the pilot of a fighter jet. Besides being just a little bit chicken, I barely had the awareness and coordination to fly a Cessna. I soloed twice and that was it. I’ve met and known some men who have flown these jets and helicopters. They are better men than I.
Balls of steel.
I’m no jet pilot but that looked virtually flawless – not a wasted or uncertain motion.
What a rush.
God, please let the men of this ilk be the leaders of tomorrow. This country won’t survive otherwise (assuming it survives the Chinese virus).
Oh, and Chuck Schumer is still a heaping pile of cow excrement.
This proves what jerks aviators are. Like the cable brake jerk; get it? I always thought aviators were primadonnas when I was an infantryman, and all of my encounters with them usually proved it. Then again, I’m a bit of an ass myself.
Actually, that was exciting and it does get your blood moving to just watch. I think he was looking at the carrier over his left shoulder.
Awesome. He’s turning left and he’s looking to see if another plane is coming up on him in the turn.
@Wayne “…What does he keep looking at to his left? Can you imagine how much you would miss that kind of flying after you get discharged? – there is no civilian equivalent!”
I’m guessing that the pilot (who looks to me to be a man, but could be a woman) is looking back towards the left at the carrier. He’s gauging his spacing so that he has enough room to complete the turn to what we in the Air Force called “final”, and to place himself on “final” at an appropriate distance from the carrier.
And yes, when you leave it, you do miss this type of flying. I flew T38s and C130s a
mumble-mumblemillion years ago, and I do miss both. There were many weekends when as a 24 year-old young stud, I was given the keys to a supersonic jet (That’s a joke. Military planes need no keys.), with orders no more stringent than to “bring it back by Sunday afternoon and don’t bend anything.” It was simultaneously more fun than anything you can do with your pants on, an awesome responsibility, and an awesome privilege.And now as a guy 2 years away from my mandatory retirement as an airline pilot, there are things about this job that I’ll miss too. Everyone loves a nice sunset, but what I’ll miss are the sunrises from 30,000 feet. Of course the next 2 years to 65 presumes that there is an industry for me to work in, which at this point isn’t an easy question to answer. We’ll see, and I can never not give thanks for the blessings that I do have, first and foremost, a terrific family.
Are there any adults on the payroll over at Wiki?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Modly
In case it gets wiped:
Thomas B. Modly is an American businessman and government official who has served as Acting United States Secretary of the Navy since November 24, 2019. [Modly is actually a spineless con artist, who shamelessly caved to the demands of the incompetent, corrupt, criminal Trump administration—when they ordered him to close ranks & stop all criticism, no matter how appropriate that criticism might be.]
Modly, who was confirmed as the United States Under Secretary of the Navy on December 4, 2017, performed the duties of the Secretary of the Navy while Richard V. Spencer was Acting Secretary of Defense and Acting Deputy Secretary of Defense from July 15, 2019, to July 31, 2019.[1]
I just checked. The landing speed of the F18 on a carrier is 250 knots, which is just under 290 mph. If he went from that speed to zero in 3 seconds, he was pulling about 4 and a half Gs on that stop.
That the landing speed on a carrier is that high (I’m just guessing here, but in the neighborhood of 100+ knots higher than a landing on a runway), has got to do with the need to have enough speed to fly if he misses the cables. FWIW, 4 1/2 g’s is very common in a fighter-type aircraft.
I agree, pilot is looking to the left often to spot possible traffic.