“There is the world dimensional for
those untwisted by the love of things
irreconcilable…”
“Meanwhile life outside goes on all around you…”
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WHEN in the course of human Events, it becomes necessary….
Welcome to the New American Digest: 2003-2020
Gerard Van der Leun
Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:
Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall
riprap of things:
Cobble of milky way.
straying planets,
These poems, people,
lost ponies with
Dragging saddles –
and rocky sure-foot trails.
The worlds like an endless
four-dimensional
Game of Go.
ants and pebbles
In the thin loam, each rock a word
a creek-washed stone
Granite: ingrained
with torment of fire and weight
Crystal and sediment linked hot
all change, in thoughts,
As well as things.
Gary Snyder
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.
Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.
This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.
— BY THEODORE ROETHKE
The scientists are in terror
and the European mind stops
Wyndham Lewis chose blindness
rather than have his mind stop.
Night under wind mid garofani,
the petals are almost still
Mozart, Linnaeus, Sulmona,
When one’s friends hate each other
how can there be peace in the world?
Their asperities diverted me in my green time.
A blown husk that is finished
but the light sings eternal
a pale flare over marshes
where the salt hay whispers to tide’s change
Time, space,
neither life nor death is the answer.
And of man seeking good,
doing evil.
In meiner Heimat
where the dead walked
and the living were made of cardboard.
His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o’clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.
— Eliot
I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this
air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their
parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.
— Walt Whitman
Comments on this entry are closed.
Nobody goes to nuclear submarines anymore. They’re too crowded.
Rimshot!
Hm. Imagine a boomer crew (ahem, us former Air Force weather people can say boomer crew, ‘cuz I flew across the Atlantic with a crew once) that’s just resurfacing after a 90-day cruise. What was going on when they went under? Covid was a thing, but the big shutdown had not happened, and certainly we had not had riots. It would have to be a bit of a whiplash.
Fake. Just like the moon landing, and the 1900 plus “ieds” that Were set off starting in 1972_ish.
Walt Disney was the imaginer that did that shit. Nobody talks about that commie bastard.
Goofy was the distraction.
What a relief and comfort it is to see our splendid ultra-hi-tech Armed Forces joining with academia and foreign countries to keep law & order on an desolate Arctic frikking ice floe while police and the National Guard take a knee as they watch our cities burn under the insurrectionists’ torches and the Generals of the Pentagon treacherously stab our President in his back.
Though I spent my share of time in the Bering Sea, or places thereabouts while on the USS Los Angeles (SSN688), I did not get to experience surfacing through the ice in the Arctic. Looks cold. As for boarding a sub, wouldn’t one prefer boarding a sub in the tropical breezes blowing across Pearl Harbor? I know I appreciated that.
I bit & clicked it, sound muted as always. After a few seconds of what looked like interesting scenery, a basement dweller appeared yapping and waving his hands. I moved on.
Too bad you didn’t get beyond the basement intro into the real world at the Pole. Sad really. Protip: You do realize that by clicking along the bottom of the YouTube you can move along to other points in the video,
According to the handy-dandy ALCOM FORM 13a dated AUG 67 that the Yankee War Department issued me at Fort Wainwright many, many years ago, at 30 below zero, exposed flesh “may” freeze in 30 seconds in calm conditions and raising the wind speed to 10 miles per hour provides a wind chill temperature of negative 60. The charts may have been revised since then but probably this one is near enough.
Protip #1, while we’re giving them: Pretty much, you just as well change that “may freeze” to “will” if that time I frostbit my snout and the medic said “Holy shit, you’re gonna lose that thing” was any indication. That’ll get your attention.
Protip #2: If you want to know what the Arctic can be like without a massive support system, or even with one if you’re foolish, Jack London can tell the tale as well as anybody:
https://www.pagebypagebooks.com/Jack_London/To_Build_a_Fire/To_Build_a_Fire_p1.html