“FOR OUR MATCHLESS FRIENDS”
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WHEN in the course of human Events, it becomes necessary….
Welcome to the New American Digest: 2003-2020
Gerard Van der Leun
Through the wild cathedral evening the rain unraveled tales
For the disrobed faceless forms of no position
Tolling for the tongues with no place to bring their thoughts
All down in taken-for-granted situations
Tolling for the deaf an’ blind, tolling for the mute
Tolling for the mistreated, mateless mother, the mistitled prostitute
For the misdemeanor outlaw, chased an’ cheated by pursuit
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
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
— Bob Dylan
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.
Comments on this entry are closed.
An awful lot of work to get 12″ off the ground.
Matches have a crappy energy-density.
Seven hundred fifty hours of meticulous toil to produce that prodigiously sulphurous squib. Can’t wait to see further consequences of the cabin fever & boredom induced by the Chinese Virus shelter-in-place/stay-at-home regime.
Matchless. Ha ha.
Yeah, he doesn’t have a girlfriend.
Walmart’s best price on wooden matches is $10.50 (free shipping) for 1000, so 1,000,000 would be about $10,500.00 right?
He gets a 10 for execution but a rather disappointing 2 or maybe 3 for performance.
Kinda’ underwhelming.
He could have made a hell of a pipe bomb with all that, and it would have made a big ass BOOM. Maybe even destroyed something useless.
JWM
The video of cats starting a falling dominoes chain reaction was a lot more entertaining, IMHO, and a lot less likely to bring the local firefighters to show up on your doorstep.
First thought was where did he get the black-headed matches?
My primitive cave stocks what is available:red-headed ones.
Bit of research reveals match heads come in the whole crayon box of colors.
Who knew??
Grandparents,probably.
A+ to MatchGuy for effort,and good video. Those prodigious sulphurous fumes made my eyes & nose water…
Ghost,
He probably ordered them in bulk for a better price. Shipped direct from Wuhan.
E for effort… F for results. Proving once again that some people just have way too much time on their hands.
The patience of Renfield, only with matches.
Spectacular, but it sure didn’t get far. Hope he was satisfied, but my reaction was “is that all?”
Back in high school, I used matchstick heads to power CO2 cartridge rockets; they’d go like the blazes for a half mile or so. They worked so well that soon I was gifted by two visitors: one from the Police Dept. and the other from the Fire Dept. For some reason they wanted to talk to my parents!
Their timing wasn’t too good though- they arrived just as the Boy Scouts Council was meeting in my living room. For a while there I was the talk of the town!