Just touch your face
Next post: Something Wonderful: Goose Visits Man Who Rescued Her Every Day
Previous post: The Pandemic Prevention Belt
Next post: Something Wonderful: Goose Visits Man Who Rescued Her Every Day
Previous post: The Pandemic Prevention Belt
Address for Donations, Complaints, Brickbats, and — oh yes — Donations
My Back Pages
In Memory Of W.B. Yeats
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
from “1054 AD”
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
Your Say
My Thinking Hat
FSA/8d22000/8d224008d22491a.tif
Search American Digest’s Back Pages
The People Yes
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
Camouflage
Sourdough Mountain Lookout
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
Chimes of Freedom
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
The Vault
My Back Pages
Byzantium
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
De Breanski
VAN GOGH
Hillegas
To the Stonecutters
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
Real World Address for Donations, Mash Notes and Hate Mail
from “1054 AD”
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.
The song, “can’t touch this!” is rolling around in my empty skull. I appreciate her sense of irony very much.
For my part, I trend towards even darker humor. Like the NBA player touching mics and then coming down with the Coronavirus. You cannot write irony this rich.
Paging Mr Rudy Gobert. Your Darwin Award is ready for pick up. Mr Gobert…
(I hope Karma has a sense of humor)
This lady makes a lot more sense than 95% of the blathering buffoons on the lobotomy box…
Were it not for my bride’s weakened state, sardonic misanthropic shit that I am, I would be enjoying all this a lot more than I am. As it is, I am thankful indeed that you kind folks were so generous as to provide me quite a few weeks of schools on making do in a contaminated world. The WuFlu will burn itself out in good time, but it won’t be our last plague, so to the already planned spring rebuild of my deck I am adding a fully plumbed decon station.
Got any plans for such, ghostrider?
The list is long, Cap’n, as it is every year. And every year all of it does NOT get done. That’s what next year is for. I too have a deck that needs some attention, on 2 different levels. In about a month my new wood lathe from Grizzly will be delivered and all bets are off on whether anything else gets done as lathes have a tendency to addict all they come in contact with. We’ll see. I’ve had a smaller lathe since 2010 with it I have created 600+ pens unlike any ever seen anywhere and sold all of them. I have also created 300+ wooden bowls and have sold about 250 of them – the others have been in a variety of art galleries. I have also created several hundred other items on that small lathe and have sold most of them too. I likes doing some lathe work.
Thinking about taking the bed off my 1991 Chevy S10 and replacing it with a home made aluminum camper. I’ve designed it in 3d in autocad and have most of the aluminum tubing on hand and I have access to a welder.
But back to the decks. We have about 1000 sq ft of deck on the first floor and about 400′ on the 2nd floor and I need to strip all of it with the pressure washer down to bare wood, then paint all the railings and stain all the decking. There is also a 32′ bridge linking the house with my office in that mess too. I need spring to start last week.
Obama virus cure here:
https://youtu.be/C1GpWOdj2e0?list=RDC1GpWOdj2e0
No evil goons. One million girls cannot be anything but fun, fun, fun.
Southern wit & wisdom;thank you ma’am,that was delightful.
Casey’s right,someone notify MC Hammer.This lady’s rant would make a great remix of “Can’t Touch This”.
It’s official,Arizonans are in panic hoard mode. Stopped at Wally World today for a couple gallons of spring water I use for coffee. Surprisingly,they still had it,but the toilet paper aisle was wiped out. (Sorry) Seriously,not one pkg left. Hand sanitizers disappeared 2 weeks ago,along with Clorox-type wipes.
The ramen noodle section,normally crammed full,had 2 pkgs of chili flavor left. Disappointing. I had hoped to add to my stock of “oriental” flavor,which has recently been changed to “soy” flavor,presumably to stop offending oriental snow blossoms.
Apparently the Coronavirus apocalypse will have Corona beer;that case was well-stocked.
Is that Mummy Pig or is it Daddy Pig?
Elvin Bishop! Yes sir!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MCLPtTKKgQ
“Man, you should have seen,
That little juke joint jump”
https://youtu.be/WtwhkS6-QHY
As always, the Muslims have the most senselessable response to plague. Blame infidels in musical form. Try not to look away.
I totally love this woman’s response! She speaks for many of us as we witness the unfolding insanity.