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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
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
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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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The version of “Target-Audience/Actual-Audience” I saw displayed the *My Little Pony* logo, with a preteen girl on the left, and a fat neckbeard male on the right.
Skorpion, you are an SOB. Now how the devil do I get the image out of my head of “a fat neckbeard male” panting over the My Little Pony logo? Maybe vodka will help.
Couldn’t hurt, in fact make it a triple, and pour me one too.
Ya know, I don’t get the neck beard thing.
I’ve had full facial hair since 1978 when I got out of the army but I still shave now and then.
My neck.
I can’t stand hair on my neck and after about 2 weeks growth it itches something fierce and I have to scrape it off. Other normal doods with facial hair have told me the same thing. So I don’t know how these neck beard idiots even do that. One more thing. Neck hair is just plain nasty and looks like shitski. Seems so many younger people now go out of their way to look foul, and if they are born retarded looking they try even harder to look even more retarded.
I’m on my third.
Being half Native American—that’s ‘Mexican’ in Gringo lingo—I didn’t begin to shave until I was in my 20s. Even when working all around the globe I could get away with shaving only every third day. Like Arafat.
Nowadays, being retired for two years, I shave when the mood hits me. I have not cut my hair in three years. With sunglasses and a pistol at my side—it is always at my side—I look like what I am: “a crazy old long haired guy with a gun.”
People avoid me. I wonder why?
Mike, you never heard of the “Bronies?”
Google at your risk.
JWM
I took the risk. May God have mercy. Just what the Hell are those things?
Some years ago I was camping at Roman Nose State Park some 60 miles from Oklahoma City. I set up camp, and waited for the girlfriend. After she arrived we drove a mile to the main ranger station to register our campsite. That station had a large ballroom type room. It was filled with weirdoes. There was some sort of convention going on, something called “Comic-Con”. Grown men and women—no, males and females—were all decked out like comic book characters. What a scene! I was especially unnerved by the males with costumes that had tails. The girl and I booked it back to our camp and poured ourselves some Maker’s Mark.
Some time later right before sunset we saw a forlorn character walking on the road to the ballroom. He was dressed like a cat—whiskers, fur, tail and all. He asked up for a ride up the road. He didn’t want to be late for some judging contest. We said sure, and the girl drove and I climbed into the rear seat right behind the “cat”. He was a class ‘A’ weird guy. As she drove I got out my Smith & Wesson .38 revolver and pointed in at the back of the seat where he was sitting. All went well, but Mr. Meow had no idea how close he had come to Eternity if he had tried something—anything—oddball.
I hadn’t heard of Bronies so followed jwm’s search.
Nope, not vodka nor Irish could mindwash that, think I need to pick up a jug of 190 proof Everclear.
…now yer drinkin’
A fine idea. I drink it when in the wilds of Arkansas.
Yep, everclear only way to go on that one..
Geez Mike I can just imagine the smirking backseat glances from the GF.
She knew. She was comforted therefore—and was smiling. Or was it smirking?
That is the reason I had the freak get into the front seat. So that I would have a clean shot if need be. The girlfriend expected me to protect her. I obliged. Of what other use are men?
“Progressives” do not at all hate capitalism. They just hate capitalism for you. For you will be forced to exist under socialism. Not them. Hell no!
They are the same about “gun control”. They are not at all against guns. They are just against guns for you. Why do you think they have been loading up every federal agency with tens of thousands of guns and millions of rounds of ammunition? Easy answer: They are going to use them alright. Against you.
They’ll be in for a surprise.
They can turn that switch on but they don’t get to turn it off.
No they don’t. We’ll turn it off when everything is said and done.
My wife, Lucretia de Sade de Boyle, sports a heinous neck beard. One day I’m gonna set it on fire.
Lance: Have you seen the Tod Browning movie “Freaks” (1932)? A entirely new world opens up after viewing it. They walk among us.
You can see it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYaCbMCPlzA
I’m downloading it right now, will view it later.
Read the entire history of that film. Bizarre hardly cuts it. Read about the lost 30 minutes that were cut out and have disappeared.
I showed it every year to my 8th graders. They were humbled therefore.
My God, what a world.
Bronies,
Sweet Jebus!!! Those freaks are a half step away from full blow fruit loops and pedophilia. I was warned.
Gird your loins and open up the Costco size Maker’s Mark, because there are even more examples of disturbing millennial weirdness out there. Look up trans-specieism. There are people who believe they are actually an animal. They wear tails and ears, sometimes snouts. Our youngest shared that on her college campus there was a girl who identified as a fox. She wore fox ears and a tail, bit into food like a fox (never used utensils), and yipped when happy. The fox girl had a fox boyfriend and they would furtively prance around campus. From time to time human “scat” would be found under benches on the small campus. I was also told about the yearly topless spaghetti charity dinner held by the campus lesbian social club (invitation only). At our daughter’s small wedding this past weekend, there were two young men awkwardly waltzing together to the folk band that was playing, just two feet from us. At the end of the song, they very formally thanked each other for the courtesy of the dance, like some dystopian version of a Jane Austen novel. As we glanced to another area, we saw a group in a circle doing high kicks and some weird variation of the chicken dance. Several had various shades of hair dye-cardinal red, plum purple, indigo, yellow, and turquoise blue and there were at least two lesbians and a tranny. Of course there were many piercings, tats, and women with partially shaved heads. That being said, they were almost all extremely nice people to talk with and everyone was having a good time at the alcohol-free, mostly vegan brunch reception. Lots of laughter. Sadly, the fox wasn’t invited, since she wasn’t a friend, only a classmate. These good friends of our daughter and SIL are fairly typical of today’s 20 somethings. It’s a brave new world out there my fellow old foggies!
Annie: I had to read your comment twice to make sure I got it all. I want to say “unbelievable” but I know it is all too believable. I conclude that: At 68, I was born too late; or that I should have been born in Republican Rome and served in the armies of Scipio. This “modern” world—actually such things as you described are as old as Babylon—grates upon me like a well-earned hangover. When will it end?
Short answer: never, but it will get worse. What’s to stop it? It will take the cleansing fire of war either foreign or domestic to wash such things away. Remember how Weimar ended.