Next post: Balance
Previous post: The Second Lieutenant
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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Many variations on that theme, all constructed of reality bricks.
The counter is the oft-whipped “Myth of the Noble Savage” which is really getting long in the tooth.
Voltaire quite accurately warned of the inevitability of the French Revolution considerably prior to the reality. The “men” in American society are not to be taken lightly. Anything at hand can and will be a deadly weapon in their hands.
“The “men” in American society are not to be taken lightly.”
=========================================
Make that *some* men.
Probably less than half of those out there.
The other half have been *feminized* in various ways.
Had to look up who Ernst Jünger was, and I cannot imagine any living European writer I’ve heard of uttering its like today. It was sort of a brief glimpse of the Europe that was, a place fading away now. Some of those Wrath of Gnon quotes make me melancholy every now and again, messages from a lost world. The World Wars destroyed it, we’re witnessing the death throes every day in the news.
Although Jerry Pournelle would remind us that despair is a sin.
My non-scientific self- consensus is that most/many of the common posters are in the 60+ age group. Personally I am following somewhat closely behind, but by a decade. I started somewhat late in my life and have an 11 and 12 year old. We train in ground combat and firearms regularly. Hopefully if/when the time comes they will know what to do. Fighting for our free way of life is justifiable.
You will fight like you train.
I love that headline… “When the First Amendment fails the Second Amendment becomes the First Amendment.” Did you dream that up, Gerard?
Monty, for Europeans currently sounding the alarm about the quicksanding of old western Europe, try the books, articles, speeches, interviews (YouTube) of Douglas Murray and Geert Wilders. From the Muslim world, Ibn Warraq, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Wafa Sultan. The nature of the threat is no secret; most of those threatened are in denial or in deep sleep or coma.
Well said, GVDL.
Upcoming masthead in heavy rotation at WRSA.