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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When she says she needs to take the day off for a “mental health day,” it’s not a joke. That’s real. I had a long conversation a couple of months ago with a very senior manager of a national insurance company who told me that all new hires have to start employment answering the phone as a customer-service rep. She said the Board even had required the new CEO hire to do that. For if they can’t cut it there, they don’t move on.
“Millennials,” she told me, “are almost immediately stressed out talking with customers. Normal customers, just calling for a clarification about something. When an irate customer calls, their heads explode. It’s not at all unusual for a new-hire Millennial to take a sick day to see a counselor after only three days on the job. The counselor then gives them a week or two of recuperation for mental wholeness. In the old days, they would have just quit or we would have fired them, but now we have to run short-staffed because they are on medical leave and the job must be held for them. Believe me, they know it, too, and are experts at gaming the system. I can’t wait to retire.”
Big Don,
Fortunate they are not equipped with similar training and experience then dropped into a combat zone.
Whew! That is an eye-opener.
I am on your premises, and you are an employer, therefore I have a job and you bear responsibility for my every well being. I guess that’s what she was thinking. If you can call that *thinking*.
About 15 years ago, the neurotic hypochondriac daughter in law had just been dumped by a call center run by an insurance company. She had too many absences. She was complaining on social media about how (the company) needed to understand that some staff have issues that need to be accomodated, and blah, blah, blah, etc. Everyone else I knew, to whom I showed the whine, thought she was nuts and in need of a reality check: companies don’t have to do that.
Now I see she was just ahead of her time.
And Casey, that’s a parody, but just barely. I was having lunch with some early 20-somethings. We talked about their college efforts. I said, “When I was your age, one could go to a state school, and work part time during the school year, and full time in the summer, and graduate owing nothing at all. But you have a Vice-president for Diversity and a climbing wall. I hope you used the wall.” I also took the blame, saying people my age allowed college costs to explode and didn’t stop it.
Later, one of those in the audience told me privately that she was greatly offended by my bringing politics into the discussion. I looked at her like she was nuts, because I couldn’t figure out what she was talking about. She was clearly trouble, and I kept my distance and arranged for her not to be on my teams in the future.
Welding, man. I need to get me some welding skills. That should carry me till death, and I don’t have to put up with millennials.