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.
Can’t agree with the Paid Family Leave. It’s extorted by force.
My workers actually are worse off for it. Before, they essentially got as much time off as needed.
Now they’ll only get what is mandated because it has raised overhead such that the only way to control labor cost is by reduction of hourly pay offsetting the additional costs of the benefit with the additional bookkeeping administrative cost.
While on vacation I had limited access to news. One brief visit to internet news read that the farmer’s union was complaining about Trump’s China policies vis lower wheat prices.
Three, two, one…what “farmer’s union”??? Farmers don’t unionize.
You need to read the news very, very closely nowadays. They will bullshit you nine ways to Sunday.
Trump for the win. Anyone else is just a government agent, out to take your property, your rights, and your dignity. Politicians suck ass; Trump comes from outside of that horseshit factory.
I just returned from the coast, where logging is the economy. While I was gone, the news starts bitching about the Amazon burning. A little research, and it becomes evident that the fires are no more numerous than in the past; perhaps a little more than last year but not as much as last decade. Look around you: much of the prairie land in otherwise green parts of my state were burned by the indians to provide hunting grounds. The Amazon is not a precipitate crisis – it is a manufactured one. Ever watch a jungle grow? It grows like a weed.
The newsies are pulling your leg, man. Believe almost nothing at face value.
Trump remains as something akin to a Force of Nature. In a straight-up, no voter fraud, no democRat nefarious dirty deeds election, Trumps Election Night victory should resemble Secretariat’s Belmont Stakes prodigious domination.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V18ui3Rtjz4
Wish I could feel confident about the above, but when it comes to the opposition’s ability to plumb the depths of sleaze, I suspect we ain’t seen nothing yet.
None of that stuff has anything to do with me.
If Trump wants to get on my good side he can cut sales tax, property tax, hell ALL taxes by 50%, to start, then he’ll get my attention.
If Trump wants to get my vote, for the first time ever, he can fire half of all gov’t employees and delete all their benefits.
Otherwise, it is life as normal around here.
Sales taxes and property taxes are controlled by your state and local governments not the federal government.
I agree that the family leave act is poor policy.
Why are you making excuses for Trump?
If he can force change around the world I’m sure he can force change right here in the country he lives in. Doesn’t anyone know how to think any more?
I think Anon was being pragmatic. Without becoming a complete dictator certain things will not and cannot be changed in four or eight years from the executive branch.
Sales tax here used to be 3%. Now it is almost 8%. FFS. How did we manage to get by at 3%? Give me the wheel and I would make it happen…. but would be blocked by countless judges. I’ve managed large budgets in business and I could always find the dead wood to cut out when necessary.
Noticed that the comment line here seems to be complaining. Folks, if you have another alternative to Trump, let’s hear it. It was a great ad, of course, but do you want any of the 20 Dems? He has labored against non-stop 24/7/365 opposition in the media, education, entertainment, shutting down of conservative voices. We all could be further ahead if half the nation wasn’t trying to destroy it.
I made a promise to myself that I’d allow Trump many, almost endless missteps, since he’s the bull in the China shop that I very desperately wanted. I’ll be straight with you, the disappointments I have with him are his one-time supportive statement for red flag laws, and the unintended consequence of lower wheat prices this year. I’m not mad at him for his centrist stuff, driven by his daughter.
His rhetoric is beyond great. My hope is that he’ll take that even further, since my sense of what’s happening now is that if we don’t speak clearly we’ll go down in flames. Twitter: own that shit. Double it down.
Then, there’s the economic boom we’ve enjoyed. Overseas, we are respected as much now as ever with maybe the exception of the WW II victory. Trump is as dovish as any president in my lifetime, with maybe the exception of Ike (you can argue Vietnam, but Ike didn’t “start” it in the way Johnson started it). This is good.
Opening a dialogue with NoKorea was a Nixonian moment, for sure. Very good.
Like I said previously, the news cycle is constant bullshit on an epic level.
My brother in law, whom I admire and respect (Korea/ Vietnam war army veteran) tried to get into complaining about trump with me. My sister and he live so far from Seattle, existentially, that I didn’t consider his mindset to be crazy. He’s more of a Roosevelt-era liberal than anything else. My defuse and comeback was to say that it is good to hear a complaint against the president because the 8 years before Trump you couldn’t complain about Obama. That was a scary time politically. I like hearing thoughtful complaints about Trump.
Another very close friend, who lives in Fla., was calling trump a lier. That one comes up often, so I thought it through. I know I am Trump-biased, so I wondered what lies he has supposedly told. My friend deflected to some shit about something – no lie related. I Googled Trump’s lies, and the first 2 results were some heap of smelly shit about the environment. My F-ing stars. This is what they’ve got: trump lies about the environment. Hold my beer while I almost puke from laughing. I want to know the lies. Send em to me.
Take it easy.
Casey said: “I wondered what lies he has supposedly told”
===========
Same here, and I looked it up.
Just as I thought.
The lying liar tried to make me jump through endless hoops to find out Trump didn’t lie at all.
I’m not saying Trump doesn’t lie, after all he’s a politician, but not in the ways the LSM is describing.
Probably the most atrocious LSM media Trump lie came early on – the pussy grabbing thing.
Have you seen the vid?
He didn’t say what the LSM and all of it’s downstream mindless parrots claim.
The LSM is not broadcasting to thinking people, they know they are lost on that genre.
They are catering to the low intellect, adolescent minded drones that are easily led by the snoot.
Just like all the other corporate and political entities are doing.
They don’t yet realize which side of their bread is buttered.