A song from nearly 50 years ago meshes well with LA in the 21st Century.
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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.
Thanks, Gerard.
Is it because I’m housebound with a broken toe? Is it because I grew up listening to EJ in the Seventies? Was it the vacation I took in LA last year (working vacation, mind you)?
Seems to be some dust in here, and getting in my eyes.
Unadorned:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UroApoVbKn0
That song will always live within me. Ironically, it was probably only a couple of years ago that I finally knew what some of the lyrics are.
God bless the internet. That was marvelous. Do people still watch TV?
Regarding the lyric comment, frequently I search for the real words to songs I grew up with.
Lay me down in sheets of linnen.
Never would have figured tjat one out.
Now try Benny and the Jets
Got me all misty, too. Good lord, I know every landmark in that video, and I’ve visited most of them at one time or other. Los. Fucking. Angeles. Hate this goddam place. Except I love it. We love to hate it and we hate to love it. But dammit, I am an Angelino. It is my city, my culture, my America. And yeah, it’s gone down hill, and it ain’t the LA I fell in love with anymore. But I’m a curmudgeonly old bastard now, myself. Still my city.
JWM
That was a piece of work, brother.
And as jwm noted above we are formed by our surroundings and adapt to the where and the what we are immersed in. By doing that we take on the flavor and texture of the meat, we feel the bones, and share the pain of our (OUR) place. As a kid I used to think doing that was peculiar to the Appalachian South since that was my place and my people made sure those origins were known to all within earshot; we were a tribe connected as much to the soil and air as to the family tree and all it’s roots. But it wasn’t just my circle that felt that way, we’re all like that and some of the connections are sweet, some are bitter, some are both.
Rob Ziobro, That’s the line I looked up, because I never could tell what he sang.
Again, you never disappoint. Thank you
A million people, a million stories, all unique.