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
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.
Buddy the Cat, and The Most Mysterious Skinamalink concur.
JWM
“I’ll shit in your shoes,
And piss in your hat,
And spray all your walls,
With essence of cat.”
-Fat Freddie’s Cat
Our 4 have no concept of such a thing.
But if they did they too would concur.
I always heard it as “A man who picks up a cat by the tail…”. Damn, now I have to hunt down the original!
I don’t want our enemies foreign and domestics to learn. I want them to die.
This is war. There are awards for 2nd place.
First place you get a Cadillac. Second place you get a set of steak knives. Third place, you’re fired.
“Glengarry Glen Ross”. That speech is perhaps the only thing Alec Baldwin did in his life that was not worthless.
… and it was written by someone else.
My thoughts too, Mike. We have been at war with them far too long and I want ’em dead too. The enemies we now face will make us dig our own graves before they kill us so that scenario needs to be our answer for them when they come for us.
They aren’t coming. They’re just going to keep you waiting for them to come. Meanwhile they make you more miserable every day. You want the battle today but they are gonna drag the war out forever.
If you’re over 40 you’re history as far as the long view goes. They know they can’t convert you, so they won’t try. They’ll just continue to make your lives more and more miserable with tiny tyrannical steps. Hoping you’ll snap and they they’ll kill you.
No, they ain’t gaming for the old ones, those over 40.
They’re aiming for the young’ns with soft moldable skallz of mush.
They are shaping them from the ground up for their future enslavement.
Look at the ones in their teens, and twenty’s. They’re scrambling to get on the cattle cars. They’ve already been programmed to hate capitalism, to hate freedom, to hate everything.
The next generation after them, the ones that are just now being born, those will be the new slaves. Born into it. Knowing nothing else but the noose. They have 2 generations of example in front of them.
Take your guns to the range and use them as you can for you will never use them in war. You can’t shoot innocent people nor can you kill phantoms beyond your weapons range. You can sit right there and boil in your rage and watch the sands of freedom slip through your fingers until not a single grain is left. You are a dinosaur being brought to slow extinction.
I’m- how do you say?- in a mood.
I cruised the bike down to the park, and past the local high school. Break time. Kids were crossing the boulevard to get lunch at the fast food joints in the local shopping center. Kids off campus. Out in the sweet autumn sun. High school kids. Masked up like dutiful little sheep. Welcome to the future.
Dead fucked.
JWM
Mike FTW
I must admit, as a child of 10 or so, I grabbed a cat by the tail and lifted it. I knew to hold it at arms-length. I was curious whether it could get free with tooth and claw. It could not, but it sincerely tried
Twain would have appreciated Heinlein on cats: “Never try to out-stubborn a cat.” (I imagine Olive is smiling to herself in the background.)
Also, there’s no education in the second kick of a mule.
As ghostsniper said, they are going to get you in ways you cant fight back: Biden to hire 87,000 new IRS agents.
“How many is 87,000?”, you ask?
Well, there’s 50 states, and say, on average, 50 counties per state.
That works out to about 35 NEW IRS against in your direct AO.
How many are already there? Add them to the new ones.
Remember, they’re armed with sheen gunz and sheeit.
Been helping the old neighbor lady out with various chores and she’s been paying you cash?
You’re reporting that shit, right?
Well guess what, your neighbor on the other side of you?
Maybe he’s one of them new revenoors.
Nice and friendly, though a little curious, about you, in his conversations.
Maybe he’s checking you out. Looking for a clue.
Wait a minute, he doesn’t have to look for a clue.
Your existence is all he needs to put the collar on you.
Drop that dime, as they say.
Then you get that “letter” in the mail, you know, the one you have to sign for.
Or maybe you have to go to the post office to sign for it, then they got ya.
You’ll never go home again.
So, now that you’ve been pre-informed about the new infiltraitors (I didn’t mispell that) what are you going to do about it? You already know what NEEDS to be done, right?
Got any ballz?
Go ahead, distort and ignore the documents and rule of law that has provided this country with the means to reach its pinnacle. Ignore it and make up the rules as you please. We the oppressed, are sitting here quietly sharpening our claws, waiting patiently for your face plant into the litter box of dumbassery. This will not end well for you.
Signed: The Cat
When the governed become ungovernable – Let Them Herd Cats…….
You just knew some cat would remind its human of the classic Super Bowl commercial:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_MaJDK3VNE
This might be a good example of the cat fighting back, or it might be a bit off topic.
“Revrund” Al Sharpton, everyone’s favorite race-baiting, commie agitator went to the Texas border to preach for those “poor criminal invaders of color” who come to the USA to “culturally enrich” it with drugs, disease, crime, murder, and sex-slave trafficking.
Bad idea, Al…
He got heckled and run off after only a minute or 2 of spewing his bullsh*t.
https://legalinsurrection.com/2021/09/al-sharpton-heckled-during-visit-to-southern-border-in-texas/
That’s my “feel good story of the day.”
I’ve the impression, right or wrong, correct or not, that 9 out of 10 professional writers are cat keepers.
Been trying to figure why, maybe because when your typing your magnum opus the cat isn’t nagging you to throw the frisbee or the tennis ball as a dog would do.
Though, on the other hand, dogs don’t usually plop themselves in the middle of one’s keyboard.
On the off chance you haven’t read it, and for any of Gerard’s commenters who joined the merry crew after February 2019, here’s is ghostsniper’s classic essay on cats and the writer’s task:
https://americandigest.org/training-days-on-the-tactics-and-strategy-of-cats-by-ghostsniper/
Gerard’s photo of his Editor (Olive) sitting on his keyboard (about halfway through the essay) is a keeper.