Noted in Passing
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WHEN in the course of human Events, it becomes necessary….
Welcome to the New American Digest: 2001-2022
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
Comments on this entry are closed.
Rump vassal Germanistan won’t be marching anywhere and will be in the cold by this winter but a 75000 degree mushroom cloud could warm things up for Jerry.
“…march through Poland…”
The irony is painfully funny.
Never fear another “Drang nach Osten”. The Germans are too feminized and woke to even contemplate a resurgence of military power.
What I find interesting is that the Deutsches Heer (the ground force of the Bundeswehr; 62,766 soldiers as of January 2022) is little more than half the size of the French Armée de Terre (118,600 active soldiers, 23,000 reservists). If Macron– nominally the French C-i-C– decided to repeat Napoleon’s triumphant entry into Berlin in 1806, he’d at least have numbers on his side.
I would rather that the Russians repeated their 1814 occupation of Paris. Russia then had 900,000 men in its army, almost the same as she has today.
Sheeesh, why is it, folks continue to underestimate the enemy, not identify our real enemy?.
We had a family chat last night, most are in their 30s. We spoke of The Draft both the Dems and Reps will start to push hard.
We spoke of dodging the draft, for obvious reasons. We spoke of exactly what/how we continue to support our fellow Americans, while not assisting our corrupt govt.
Do we continue to vote, knowing the games rigged, like most here we just want to be left alone. Unlike most here, we recognize a fights coming.
Mostly we’ve agreed to just stop watching TV
I will still vote, though with eyes wide open. It is only one tool, though a rather ineffective one. There are more robust methods to effect change. If it cannot come peacefully, it will come in other ways.
ONE more try with the ballot box. “Eyes wide open” indeed. If this one is stolen, I’m done with trying to vote our way out of this.
Not expecting good things; expecting necessary and unpleasant.
Your either vote for the current criminal or the next one.
This has been clear for a long time.
Again, I won’t participate in the criminal charade.
I’m way too busy trying to live and won’t let much get in my way.
That made me laugh.
The only people I’ve ever had tell me that voting is a waste are felons.
OK, I guess completely radicalized I am.
Nope, not rootin’ for Putin but am ravein’ for the Russians.
Seeing the world, the New Word Order, Davos, world economic forum et al, shutting down Russia, isolating, refusing to exchange with, removing all access to monetary markets has really got up my nose.
First they came for the Canadian Truckers, now they’re attempting to destroy a country. The slow, early on almost invisible, march toward a global totalitarian state aided and abetted by most of our “democratically elected, and/or appointed leaders” has become a rumbling charge & yes, those quotation marks were scare quotes.
Russia against the world? Gotta admit, I rooting for the underdog now.
Most of the word does not matter. It is a sideshow of a sideshow. Russia, China, the USA and Europe matter. The US and most of Europe are members of Globohomo and have the same view of the world as that held by Gates and Schwab. China is not a member but does not mind it as long as it stays away from her internal affairs. To China—that brutal, inhuman, God hating gulag—Globohomo weakens the West and so is favored. Russia is most definitely not part of Globohomo. In fact, Schwab officially condemned Putin after the Ukraine invasion, Ukraine being an outpost of Schwab and Globohomo.
Russia is the good guy. The 3rd Rome in fact.