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
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
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As I sit glued to my recliner, watching the Bacardi, Corn Hole championship, the excitement is staggering. Not sure if my NEW fav is now Corn Hole, or Curling! I hate these tough choices.
Dirk
I just watched a utoob of a dood turning some kind of burl into an urn and it was mesmerizing. Almost as enjoyable as turning it myself. Sometimes I save the vid without viewing it, then afterward I watch it with VLC at twice the speed as it reveals the end result hidden deep within. It’s always a surprise, not knowing what it’s going to be, until it is. Maybe 1 in a hundred is a nightmare, the rest are dreams. I have a 40lb maple burl sitting over there for the past 2 years, all painted white to slow the drying/shrinking until such time that it hits the stage for it’s presentation performance. I have log chunks 10+ years old waiting their turn. Many. Maybe 50 or more.
I could easily imagine that entire quote being broadcast daily by the US Government. Take out the word “online” from the first sentence and the meaning becomes more intense, more menacing. Goebbels would be quite pleased with it.
The whole statement is propaganda. Its six statements are a tissue of lies.
That’s exactly what I thought. We should instead consume traditional news from outlets like the New York Slimes, the Washington Compost, or Newsweak. And only watch time tested broadcast news from CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NPR, etc etc etc. They would never mendaciously lie, obfuscate, misinform, or bury stories damaging to the Democrat agenda.
Perish the thought that the media would ever lie, hide the truth, “forget” to report something, or favor the Democrat Party. Nope. Never.
Now Dorothy, you really don’t want to look behind that curtain, do you?
All is ‘Maya’, “a magic show, an illusion where things appear to be present but are not what they seem.”
The key here is “MOST of what you read…” Getting good info off the internet is like panning for gold; you go through a lot of gravel to get a few valuable nuggets. Lots of stuff, even here, is amusing but ephemeral, but at least once a week I find a nugget: using the bread fastener thingy for tape rolls, catching an alligator with a wheelie trash can, and anything by the Essential Craftsman are just some examples. Remember Sturgeon’s Law: 90% of EVERTHING is crap. But you gotta look for the 10% in nuggets.
True enough. The author wrote in the 2nd person, but by simply changing it to the 1st person, we can get an idea of what the writer was really saying. From “The point is, most of what YOU read online today is pointless.” becomes “The point is, most of what I read online today is pointless.” And so on. It is a confession of sorts.
Like Thoreau’s ““The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation, and go to the grave with the song still in them.” How could Thoreau possibly know that? He could not. It was confession of sorts.
Supporting causes from faraway lands is not necessarily without merit, but too often it is a waste of mental time and energy.
Stories from faraway places might be more gripping and dramatic than the ones nearby, but we have agency in the ones nearby. The world we can physically feel and touch is the world that matters and is real. The digital world, with its stories from distant shores, is filtered and intangible and we live in it like wraiths.
Our ancestors mostly lived in the world they were in. Sometimes they thought overmuch about the afterlife and the supernatural, sometimes they got lost in their own fantasies, but mostly they lived in this physical world, and did not fret overmuch about what was happening in places where they had no agency.
We are going mad because we think and know too much about what is happening in other domains. We have choices, we can live in the physical world of our here and now, or we can live like bots and half-beings in the digital world.
Excellent. I’ve said similar many times but you were more eloquent about it.
Well said and well written. It’s something I have noticed about so-called “Christian” evangelical churches. They spend their time and money on foreigners, when the real mission field is here in the US. You know, among their true brothers and sisters. The ones they see every day.
What happens next door is vastly more important than what happens in Kampala.
Been going on for a long time. In Charles Dickens’ novel BLEAK HOUSE (1852-53), he satirizes the type in his character Mrs. Jellyby, who’s always sponsoring missions in Africa or Asia while she ignores starving children in her own neighborhood.
This disease—of preferring the foreign, the exotic—is a sickness only found in what remains of the West. Who thinks that panda faced Xi Jinping cares a whit about any non-Chinese? He and every Chinese despot murderer has no problem putting to death tens of millions of their own people. What do you think they would do to any white boy who “got out of line”?
Those like Mrs. Jellyby are the “useful idiots” beloved by Lenin and his types.
I guess it depends on what you’re looking for. Without the online resources I have sought out, I would’ve been bereft of the many valid scientific opinions warning me to have nothing to do with the Clot Shot. These have augmented and reinforced my resolute religious beliefs and my intrinsic distrust of any government institution associated with the promulgation of this untested gene “therapy”.
Looks like you can add highly educated nuclear physicists to the list of those wanting nothing to do with this so-called vaccine.
Yet’ we’re told that it’s only uneducated, Luddite, wacko, conspiracy theorists who’re arguing against the Clot Shot.
What is a boy to do, when he can’t believe the yammering talking heads on the “news” show-grams?
https://tinyurl.com/4wwrvdwz
Presumably, these people know a thing, or two, about Science.
Exactly.
I see the internet as a vast library of information, of opinion, of resources. Like any library in History—except the Library of Alexandria—it is full of trash. Libraries contain Will and Ariel Durant’s “The Story of Civilization” as well as “Heather Has Two Mommies”. What a man chooses to read says a great deal about him.
I’ve not trusted Da Gubiment for a long time. The internet at least provides the medium for others to understand the evil and corrupt shitpile that has been destroying this country for several decades now. Back in the day, mid-ninety’s or so, and for a couple of years until I ran out of money, the County Family court edubacated me about trusting the government. I lost everything but mostly the ability to influence my children. I was a powerless parent. The schools in cahoots with my Can’t Understand Normal Thinking (CUNT) ex-wife and the school psychologists began drugging both my children with speed…er Ritalin and the like. It was thing to do (now they want to vaccinate babies…my god). My poor kids never had a chance.
The Bush administration punctuated my faith in the new century’s American leadership by killing over a million middle-eastern men, woman and children under the pretense seemingly infinite propaganda, with the crown jewel deception-seconded by our own hell-residing Colon Bowel: Weapons Of Mass Destruction.
Lies, lies and more lies. I can’t imagine it all ending well. Crescendo soon”
Damn. You give the phrase “divorce rape” a new and deeper meaning. I hope to God your kids have a chance to recover.
What a world.
That paragraph uses sixty-five words to say, “Separate the wheat from the chaff.”
Yes. The Carpenter was much more concise.
Sturgeon’s law: Ninety percent of everything is crud.
Published in 1958.
Only difference twix then and now, internet access allows it to be piled wider and higher.
The internet also allows anyone to access quotes by Theodore Sturgeon.
Yep and though I haven’t found it on the internet yet, one of Ted’s corollaries, -or an addendum to to Ninety percent of everything is crud was, ‘including this statement’.
Damn your logic! But what of the 10 percent? How do we find it?
Turtles mired in crud all the way down.
Imagine, using the time we ALL waste daily on the net, doing productive stuff. Hell my grand parents would have walked forty miles uphill to school, in a tornado, in my morning hour spent dicking the dog!
Admittedly, I achieved a totally useless status, in my world. No easy task!
VI
“Wasted time” is like Bertrand Russell’s “useless knowledge”. No such thing. The net is “unproductive”? Really? How could I have ever had the pleasure to meet you without the web? That is only one example; I have myriads. You are “useless”? Not according to the Being who created you.
A free man spends his time as he chooses. No one, not even God Himself, can tell him otherwise. The web is as much of an infinity as any man can handle. What a man does with this is his business.
Consider an automobile. One can drive it to church or to a strip joint. It is a choice. The web is as evil or as good as the man who uses it. So are guns.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ternps0JFwo
Watch the whole film. You will be better for it.
“Consider an automobile. One can drive it to church or to a strip joint.” Indeed. The real question is which of the two is the evil choice. Probably depends on the church.
Actually went to church for the first time in at least ten years, yesterday. It did not go well!. Sadly god made me an alpha, at times, a miserable existence. First I picked the free cappuccino apart, then found fault in the structure itself. The sheep in the talkin room were pissing me off.
This all before the preacher said one word. THEN he opened his pie hole, and good god, things got downright uncomfortable. Friends, downhill from there.
I literally spent the entire year a captive to a pulpit bully, subject matter divorce. At one point I dam near stood and shouted at no one in particular, “ Ok Ok you win, I AM a no-good rotten sinner.
Actually felt like every set of eyes in the room were enjoying watching me shrink ten ft. That one hour took years off my life. When the beat down was over, I fled out a side door, well not so fast, my wife firmly took my hand, and flung me into the greeting room. I developed stage fright. Made zero eye contact.
I had nooooo idea some much blue hair existed in the world. All right there in my NEW lil church. A tough day for me. Friend I couldn’t even fake it. AND the preacher finally came for me, excuse me, sir, where do I know you from.
Told him I was the guy who gave him 500.00 dollars in bribes to officially marry my daughter off, this past summer. Ah yes, he said, his beefy eyes on me like a vulture. He says, will WE be seeing more of you, Mr. Williams?.
Sir, I hope not, this morning has been brutal, don’t know if my heart can take it, the coffee and donuts are like a fishing hook, but then preacher you already know that, don’t chaaaa.
He looks at me thru his pop bottle glasses, smiles, and said, effective wouldn’t chaaaa say.
He turns as he says “ see you next week”. Looks like you really need to be here for repairs
The entire time, my wife says not one word, just smiles. As we get in her truck she casually says, amusing, I’ve not seen you this uncomfortable in many many years. Aaaa honey must have been something I swallowed like a hook. She says “ sure”.
Dirk
Quite the story. I’ve got one:
I decided after 30 years of walking with Lucifer to return to the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. Imagine my fright as I contemplated my sins as I worked my way to Confession. Every voice and fiber in my being was saying “run away!” I walked into the Confessional—face to face, not that simpering “behind the screen” cowardice—and began. I had even written out all of my known sins over the past 30 years. The priest listened to my pitiful cries until he could take it no longer. “Stop!” he said. He then grabbed the piece of paper upon which I had inscribed my sins. He tossed it aside and said, “Go now my son. Your sins are forgiven. Your Penance is to go the Mass and take Communion.”
I had never had a better day in my life. Still haven’t.