NOW – Large protest against vaccine mandates in New York City.pic.twitter.com/2zvqrlZIhE
— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) October 25, 2021
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.
welcome to New York.
Oh please. Hardly a protest. Look at the yellow vests in France. Look at the longshoreman in Trieste. Even the Aussies did a better protest. These Sunday drivers all look like cattle being herded through a chute. For a nation as armed to the eyeballs as Amuricca, we don’t seem angry enough.
Not enough Americans are angry enough, but I suspect that the nation is still in the prelude to horrors stage.
Just wait a little longer.
Spicy time approaches.
Hell, almost as many folk as what turned up for the WBNA champions!
The “elites” look upon these protests as rather cute affairs. They then go about their business as if nothing happened. Because nothing happened. A man can go outside, put on a yellow vest, wave the American flag, scream some slogan, run back and forth and jump up and down all he wants. And then what? The man might feel better, but that is all.
The change will come when people begin to die. When one side opens fire, and the other side responds in kind. You want another “shot heard ’round the world”? That will be it.
Are you still living/teaching south of the border Mike?
I ask as distance gives a different perspective and I often see things differently from up here atop the world than as seen by those in the lower forty eight. Many of your postings see the forest as well as the trees.
Thank you kindly.
I left South America in 2004. Since then I’ve been back to Guatemala three times, but never to the wilds of the Andes or the purity of the South American jungles. I yearn for them still, but what’s to be done in this “era of COVID”?
If this “pandemic” nonsense ever ends, and if my 68 year old body holds up for another three years—big ifs—I have these dreams:
http://mikeaustin.org/dream_sabbatical.htm
God is in charge. If He says “No!” then it is no. And if he says “Yes!”? Well then, on with the show.
People have already started dying. Roughly 750,000 so far.
At least. Moloch is one hungry demon.
And how many of the Law Enforcement Officers that are “bravely” risking their jobs by defying the jab mandate would gladly, if granted an exemption, go full “Australian” on the remaining unvaccinated souls that violate the mandate?
And how many of these officers would continue in their work if, upon returning home, they found their families slaughtered?
We have a winner!
It’s a great question.
It will be a question upon every officer’s mind. It will take just one “incident” and their thoughts will be wonderfully concentrated. These “law enforcement” types understand perfectly well that they live among those they are directed to shoot down. And everyone in the neighborhood knows this as well. As he leaves for “work” will he notice dozens of eyes peering at him from behind curtains?
Civil Wars are grisly, bloody and treacherous affairs. The US is about a get a lesson in just how grisly, how bloody and how treacherous they are.
Use the time remaining wisely.
“As some day it may happen…” (Mikado)
Amusing, you just let communism steal your fucking country, and your talking slaughtering families. The bravado is staggering.
Dirk Williams
“You just let communism steal your fucking country…” Who did?
“Your talking slaughtering families.” Either such horrors happen during civil wars, or they do not. It has nothing to do with anyone’s feelings toward such abominations. Every nation ever conceived has gone through civil war. Almost all suffered such terrors.
“The bravado is staggering.” It is not bravado to read books and report what they said.
And may I ask how one would “stop communism from stealing the fucking country”? Would you use Poetry? Flowers? Placards? Marches? Strongly worded letters to the editor? How?
We would really like to know.
Morning Mike, “WE”, let them steal a nation, how would i stop it,,,,, let’s see, how about this, pack my kit, arraigned my target packages, all the while assuming “ The Others” we’re doing similar preparation,
And you wait for the blogdaddies, you know the ones who continue to stir the shit, talk louder,,,,,lthump their chests. All ya need is conformation someone did something, someone took that first action.
And crickets, the silence was deafening. Which is why I’m vocal about the usual talking heads, fucking cowards. I include me in that crew.
Valuable lesson,,,,,men I thought were sincere, and would stand tall, cowered as they eat their number 3 super sized from McDonald. Their hands in their pockets, bobbing for French fries in the white bag, easier then digging a hole in the sand to insert their fucking heads in the sand.
Mike, what I can tell you, is this. Your govt is scared shitless of We The People. They spend billions and billions on keeping an eye on men like me, others. The man power utilized is staggering. The snitch’s WILL sell you your crew into slavery to save their skin, for a few dollars, to beat a beef they have over their heads.
Admit it with the theft of this 2020 election these United States achieved Communism, “ Socialist Democrat” is code for communism, call em what they are.
Unless We find the balls to stand up, and wrestle our country back, welllllll, clearly that’s not going to happen, na we’re gonna talk em to death.
As a history teacher my friend you know how this works. After all it’s just history repeating itself, Or is it, is it different this time.
Mike, we’re all to busy enjoying the lives we carved out for ourselves. As I’ve said before,,,,, we have become comfortably numb.
So what’s it going to take. Hmmm, I’m guessing it is the pissed off house wives who will stomp this nonsense to death, starting in the academic realm, and mushrooming upward . All while us men sit at home and wonder where the lil woman’s at this evening. Cuz we’re hungry, and dinner isn’t gonna cook itself.
Dirk
Mike Mike Mike, blood pressure my friend, not poking you, I’m poking 300 million plus pussies. I’m poking those blogdaddies who stir the bullshit, day in day out, hiding behind silly screen names, cuz the gov, won’t figure out exactly who they are. I’m poking the blogdaddies who pretend that the Intel they just shared was from gods lips to their ears. I get it their frustrated.
Answer this for me, are these right wingers making money storing the shit? I’ve learned that right wing bloggers will never solve the problem or suggest solutions. No sir, ain’t no money in that. And those shit stains ARE making money spinning the narrative.
Na Mike theirs more then enough shame to go around. Like AA, working the steps. Until one excepts their part of the responsibility ain’t nothing going to change.
So here I am making amends with you, I apologize for my words my deeds, my actions which have offended you.
VI
Dear Dirk:
I was not offended, just surprised.
I have been reading your comments here at Gerard’s place for a long time. My summation? You are a far better man than I am. With more real world experience too.
You are so right: There those—most with odd screen names—who “stir the pot”, reveling in the shit-storm they themselves have caused.
As for “more than enough shame to go around”: I have done things in my life so shameful that only my confessing priest knows. Once when I mentioned some moral outrage I had committed, he said, “Wow. That’s bad.” Yes it was.
I once said that a man spends his first 40 years making a mess of things, and the next 40 years trying to clean up his mess. I have 12 years to go. I’m working on it.
Mike, far better man “ hardly”, I’m just another guy trying to make it to the end. I see zero resolve in group think pussy footing my experiences. I happen to believe we can learn from other experiences.
Everybody here has my respect.
GV, provides a medium for informed educated, people with vision. That we sometimes cross wires is hardly “ a thing”. It’s just life brother.
Group think is dangerous, not a lot of that goes on here, I view peeps here as free thinkers. Free thinkers whom are not afraid to think big and deep. Not a day goes by that something truly, significant, deep, Heavy isn’t shared here.
What’s not to like about free thinkers what they share.
Lol, free thinkers, pure bloods, a lot to like about American Digest.
Elvin Bishops, killing it on the stereo! “ we gonna boogie til the rooster crows!
VI
As for Elvin Bishop—according to Charlie Daniels—“He ain’t good lookin’ but he sure can play!” A guitar god and a blues master.
““WE”, let them steal a nation…” We saw it but had no idea it would go this far. We all thought, “Ok, this is really stupid commie shit, but surely it can’t go further.” But it went further. Much further. And now our—our?—government calls us “domestic terrorists”. Alright then. We know where it stands. Any man who does not see this by now is blind beyond hope.
“Mike, what I can tell you, is this. Your govt is scared shitless of We The People.” Damn right it is. We see naked fear in what it does, in what it says, what it plans. Let them fear. Let them hate.
“As a history teacher my friend you know how this works. After all it’s just history repeating itself, Or is it, is it different this time.” No. A rotting disease follows a certain path no matter the body infected. we are going the way of all decaying tissue, with this proviso: We have the antibodies of 100,000,000 firearms in private hands. All bets are off. History has no example of a government hated by one-third of its citizens, all of whom are armed to the teeth. Millions of us served in the Sandbox, and so are well versed in military operations. Funny, yes: The US Government trained the very men who will put her to death. We are about to—drum roll—make history.
“Mike, we’re all to busy enjoying the lives we carved out for ourselves.” Hell yes. We carved out our own lives free from government interference. And again, Hell yes we enjoy them. When the government intrudes upon our happiness…well, it should expect a certain reaction. A very certain reaction. We are men. We do what men do. What men have always done. We do what we were created to do. By God. By His Son.
“I happen to believe we can learn from other experiences…Everybody here has my respect…GV, provides a medium for informed educated, people with vision. That we sometimes cross wires is hardly “ a thing”. It’s just life brother.” Indeed. Nothing on the web like Gerard’s place. I can be myself, and learn from so many. I am a better man therefore.