![Minneapolis by AD reader Gordon Scott [Updated by GS in comments]](https://americandigest.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/https___cdn.cnn_.com_cnnnext_dam_assets_200527104052-21-minneapolis-protests-0526-1-1024x682.jpg "Minneapolis by AD reader Gordon Scott [Updated by GS in comments]")
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
FSA/8d22000/8d224008d22491a.tif
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
Van der Leun: The Normblog Bio of Your Host
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.
Amazing video. Very ballsy to hang around to film it. I would have been driving a hundred miles an hour in the opposite direction!
Sad day…..feared this was the case. https://americandigest.org/mia-remus-and-the-woodpile-report/#comment-40138
Ol’ Remus……..RIP. Sad.
This guy shot some really good video. I’d like to see more squealing, vulgarity and obscenity in the commentary, though.
I did note that despite the tornado moving through farmland, there were no tanker trucks, combines, cows or tractors in the funnel or being dropped around him. Just his good luck, I guess. Getting that close to even a small tornado is foolish, as a piece of 2X4 and your skull can try to occupy the same space at the same time unexpectedly.
When I was training as a weather creature in 1980, there was about one minute and 30 seconds of grainy, distant film of tornadoes in the whole world. This guy has three times that amount, crystal clear, parts from within 100 yards. And he’s one of at least a dozen who have posted footage from that day.
I went shopping for a phone, because my old one broke. I was trying to decide between an S-20, which has seven cameras, and the less expensive and practically obsolete S-10, which has a mere five. Those cameras are as good in picture quality and better in that they shoot video, as the $1000 rig I used in the 1970s. And, it fits in my pocket.
I’ve lived in Kansas most of my life. I’ve seen just one tornado. Google 1991 Andover tornado Duke Evans Video and you will see the same F5 that I did. I think that is the most scared I have been in my life. I think it killed 21 people that day. It got only within a mile of my house at that time, but debris covered my yard afterward. Small chunks of pink housing insulation was everywhere.
His final words some day will be “Wow! Oh oh …oh shit!” Video downloaded later from his Cloud server will be super awesome. Grew up in Tornado alley and seen and survived my share of tornados. They will kill you.
Remus news. You won’t like it.
https://westernrifleshooters.us/2020/07/11/rip/
Gordon,
Absolutely agree about the amazing footage, but, damn! Scary!
I hitch-hiked quite a bit in my younger days and on one trip from Denver to points east, I was the passenger among four, 3 in the cab and me in an open bed pick-up, along with somebody’s dog. Well, about halfway through Kansas we started to hit a little rain, but at highway speeds if you hunker up near the cab the rain just flies over you and you can manage to stay dry. Eventually, the driver pulled and asked me if I had taken a look forward and to the north….oh, my! In one section of that big sky were the darkest storm clouds I had ever seen and then, along to the north the clouds turned down to the distinct funnel shape and you could see large piece of debris swirling around the outer periphery. Fortunately, the twister stayed north of our route and we carried on. That dog and I finally did get a soaking when the rains went sideways and came down in buckets.
RIP Ole Remus
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Movu8ydF2QM
A good illustration of the Winston Churchill quote: There is nothing in life as exhilirating as to be shot at with no effect.
Accordingly … few things in life are as exhilirating as being caught out in the open during Cat 1 tornado
Regarding Remus;
https://ogdaa.blogspot.com/2020/07/sad-news-about-ol-remus.html
RIP Remus, you had a great run.
& thought it’s 8:05 in the morning I lift a shot of Jameson to his memory.
I googled “Remus Marsilva obituary” and combinations thereof. I see no obituaries of our venerable hero. I am not giving up hope yet.
@ snakepit….. I’m not giving up, either. I think “friend of wife” is full of shit. Whoever she is she’s done nothing to provide any proof, any reality, any anything. Her cryptic contribution to the dialog is harmful purposeful confusion. She has no credibility, no honor, no class whatsoever. She’s a troll.