IL CAPO: “Watch the hands. They tell a story.”
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WHEN in the course of human Events, it becomes necessary….
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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
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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
Comments on this entry are closed.
Seems like some classical music would go well with the conducting.
Also, the missing fingertips tell a story of the hands not quite getting out of the way of something heavy.
Always interesting to see someone doing a real job with finesse borne of experience.
I keep seeing a big block of feta cheese.
Every “progressive” who wants to see men feminized should watch this video. This is an extraordinary example of men doing men’s work.
I find myself hoping for another Michelangelo (whose hands were roughened and disfigured too) to free some larger-than-life statues from the marble that Il Capo is quarrying. The beauty of the stone itself is as much a character in the video as is the maestro directing the machinery.
Put some of those Seattle Sissies on that job site for a year and video the transformation.
The best part was the orchestration between the 2 Track-Hoes.
Line the left one up, then lock it in place with a fist, then ease the right one into it’s place.
Excellent.
The guys running those track hoes seem to know what they are doing, too!
Many years ago I went to a butcher shop to get some barbecue makings. There was a man behind the counter cutting chops using a band saw. Since the meat was frozen he had heavy rubber gloves on. Being a wise ass I commented “how many fingers are you missing under those gloves?” He responded by taking a glove off and show three fingers cut off at various knuckles. I shut up.
Speaking of bandsaws. I took woodshop in 7th grade (and every grade thereafter) and the instructor was emphasizing to us students how wrong it was to try to cut a round piece of wood (like a dowel) on the bandsaw and he held up the remains of his left index finger. Because the bandsaw blade travels from top to bottom it forces the stock against the table and if that stock happens to be round it will try to rotate and pull the fingers holding it right into that powerful blade.
Quite frankly my bandsaw is so powerful, as well as the tablesaw, that when I turn them on the sound of the motor and blades terrifies me so that my blood pressure goes straight through the moon. Drillpress, lathe, jointer, etc., no problem, the fingers are well back from the blades. But the band and table saws require direct 100% visual and mental attention, no exceptions ever.
Having said that, I built a sled for both the band and table saws that I can lock down round wood on them and cut it safely. After working with dangerous woodworking tools for more than 40 years I still have all my fingers but I have no escaped entirely unscathed. The scars show your dedication to the craft., and sometimes your lack of attention and carelessness.
Yep, that is some sweet teamwork there. Now I have in the past myself signaled for many a heavy and quite a few very damned tight lifts, up to say 120 tons (the 2240 lb ones, so about the same metric or imperial), and thought I was pretty good, but the Chief seems to be operating on a “whole ‘nother” level.
Of course, this being blue collar-ish work, all of it will have to be hidden away from the sensitive eyes of modern western urbanites, lest the toxicity of the masculine behaviors shown poison their very souls, assuming, of course, that they possess any.
Fascinating. Thanks.
That’s pretty spectacular ‘conducting’! There is really nothing much more satisfying that watching men at work doing what they’ve perfected. A number of years ago I started work at an art museum about the time they commenced adding a complicated, partly-underground, addition. During my break times I could go outside where there was a good viewing site overlooking the ‘dig’ into a very thick rock layer. It was captivating to watch one monstrous machine (like those on this video) with large toothed extensions carefully pry huge rock just as one might use a forefinger to lift out a piece of gravel from a garden. It was huge, but so very delicate, and the operator obviously knew exactly how to remove just the right amount at the right time. It was quite a show! Thanks for sharing this.
I’m still slackjawed at the pit itself. A pit of marble, for Chrissake!! The pit itself is a work of art; looks like a marble statue of a pit