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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
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Impressive!
cBS deserves a big, fat, throat punch when they get within reach.
Dan Rather’s big break…. Dallas, Texas November 25, 1963… reading from a prepared script… “his head could be seen to move violently forward.” Dan started out lying and went on to a brilliant career.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kiSoxFHyjGY
Tried to watch some Over-The-Air TV recently and was amazed at the over representation of negro’s across the board. Scanning some 30 different channels over a 30 minute period showed that this is the norm on all available channels.
About 4 years ago we got rid of the dish and started watching DVD TV shows from the 50’s, mostly westerns, at suppertime – the only time we watch TV at all. Last nights show was from the series “Wells Fargo”. We have 4 DVD players and currently Wells Fargo is in 1, Death Valley Days in 2, Zane Grey Theater in 3 and Gunsmoke season 2 in 4. No commercials, no screen blocks or pop-ups, minorities are realistically represented and fairly decent writing. Though I will say that the 50’s Hollywood representation of “cowboys” was unrealistic for the most part to the point of being ridiculous. We routinely get all kinds of offers from the dish company in the mail and having looked them over a time or 2 they just don’t seem to get it, or don’t care. We’ve moved on and will prolly never go back, I mean, what’s the point?
CBS? Who the hell are they? -shrug-
CBS, along with the other agit-prop organizations, constitutes the sphincter through which information is either allowed to be disseminated or not. When I was a guileless, young, impressionable person, I bought into the Uncle Walter Cronkite “most trusted man in America” myth. Upon learning some years later about his sabotage in his reportage of The Viet Nam War, I felt absolutely betrayed by him and his cohorts. That was my Red-Pill moment all those many decades ago and I’ve never believed one of those jackwagons since. I do not watch the “news”, but occasionally surf the evening propaganda shows to see what is being foisted upon the sheeple. I’m continually amazed by the tawdry, dumbed-down presentation of the mis-information offered, and am amazed that anyone watching wouldn’t feel affronted by the insipid nature of the “product”.
Lionel Nation posted this yesterday. A clear concise summary of the pathetic report card which reveals how MSM news has failed us all. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Le_TYoVSto
Television was of course around in my childhood in the ’50s, although the set belonged to my grandmother and played almost exclusively Lawrence Welk and Liberace, and consequently held little fascination for me. There was, after all, radio, which up until the late ’60s actually transmitted music.
I dunno; I lived with a television set for awhile in the ’60s, and then briefly in the early ’90s. My abiding impression is that when you turn it on there’s a brief warm-up period followed by a smiling huckster intoning in a resident baritone, “Hi, Stupid!” Nowadays it’s only unavoidable in the confines of waiting rooms, and I’m rarely without earplugs and a book. How anybody could abide several decades of the vacuity of the the newsbimbos of whatever sex is just beyond me.
Television makes you stupid, kids. Pay attention. And for God’s sake learn to read.
(Sniff) My rant went unpublished….
And now, through my superpowers as ruling GodEmperor of American Digest, it has been restored to life. [Extra credit for identifying the literary reference in the previous sentence. Extra SPECIAL credit for identifying the blog reference.]
Dan Rather thought he was going to bring down GWB. Turns out, he brought down himself. What a chump.
I used to take for face value what the media said. When Randy Weaver’s family go shot up, I figured they deserved it. They had to be guilty of something. Then to find out all the whitewashing done on the story. Randy’s son shot in the back. His wife shot in the head while holding an infant. That was the beginning of realization that neither the media nor Gubmint can be trusted.
Now we learn in past few years that the State Dept. IRS, Justice Dept., FBI and many other Gubmint entities are politically biased and rotten to the core.
“Our staff of former government psychiatrists and Hollywood screenwriters are here to help with the readjustment process.”
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zWTQVl71txk