“There is the world dimensional for
those untwisted by the love of things
irreconcilable…”
“Meanwhile life outside goes on all around you…”
Next post: Article of the Week: Why You Should Stop Reading News
Previous post: Light Fuse and Get Away
“There is the world dimensional for
those untwisted by the love of things
irreconcilable…”
Next post: Article of the Week: Why You Should Stop Reading News
Previous post: Light Fuse and Get Away
Address for Donations, Complaints, Brickbats, and — oh yes — Donations
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
My Back Pages
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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.
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