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
His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o’clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.
— Eliot
I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this
air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their
parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.
— Walt Whitman
The scientists are in terror
and the European mind stops
Wyndham Lewis chose blindness
rather than have his mind stop.
Night under wind mid garofani,
the petals are almost still
Mozart, Linnaeus, Sulmona,
When one’s friends hate each other
how can there be peace in the world?
Their asperities diverted me in my green time.
A blown husk that is finished
but the light sings eternal
a pale flare over marshes
where the salt hay whispers to tide’s change
Time, space,
neither life nor death is the answer.
And of man seeking good,
doing evil.
In meiner Heimat
where the dead walked
and the living were made of cardboard.
Gerard Van der Leun
Notice the book right behind Roddy Piper’s ear when he sees the alien at 2:29. “Edgar Cayce on ESP”
Nice touch in the details. This was a better movie than we realized when it came out. Certainly prescient.
I’m damn low on bublegum, myself. I think the whole nation is…
JWM
There’s also a book on the Bermuda triangle below that one.
I have a picture of him mock arm wrestling with my son in a bar in Tampa about 15 years ago.
I used to be a hard-core WWF fan back in the Hulk Hogan era. For years I went to every show at the Sports Arena along with my pal Jeff, and my mother. God, how Mom used to love the Hulkster. I saw Rowdy Roddy Piper perform a bunch of times. It was great fun. We often ran up hundred dollar beer tabs before the show was over. We’d all get roaring drunk, and holler ourselves hoarse. Luckily, our guardian angels must have gone with us. We always made it home, OK.
JWM
I “put on the sunglasses” years ago. Haven’t removed them since except to spy on the Hive Mind from time to time. It seems that one-half of mankind is alien, weird, controlled, subservient, robotic. Like a man infected with hookworms, they don’t know they are infected. If told their condition, they would fight like Hell to shut you up. Men become so used to the Dark, they cannot stand in the Light. Most of them are Eloi; their rulers are Morlocks.
I often wonder if we have really discovered all the rules of Physics, that there might remain other forces yet unseen that really guide the world. We get hints of these from time to time, but dismiss them as “outliers”, unexplainables, freakish. Some men know of them but—wisely for now—keep such esoterica to themselves. If we knew who they are we might call them prophets. Or we might put them to death.
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
Tocqueville 1835–Princes had turned violence into a physical thing but our democratic republics have made it into something as intellectual as the human will it intends to restrict. The unity, the universality, the omnipotence of society’s power, and the uniformity of its rules represent the outstanding feature of all the political systems invented in our day. They recur at the heart of the strangest utopias. The human mind still pursues these images even in its dreams.
I never had a taste for de Tocqueville. Of course I had to read some of “Democracy in America” in college, but found it tedious. Nowadays I find almost all political philosophers tedious. (Well, maybe not parts of Locke, Hobbes and Jefferson.) I really don’t know why. I used to devour such things.
Perhaps because such talk is obsolete for now. It is no longer a question of comparing laws, constitutions, forms of government and such. Genteel discussions of political theory while sipping Chablis are worse than useless; they take time away from far more necessary activities.
“Whose side are you on?” is a much more pressing question than “What do think of the ‘social contract’ of Hobbes?”
Or as Lenin would say, “Who? Whom?”
Mike sed: “It seems that one-half of mankind is alien…”
=======
Now.
I suspect 90% can easily become aliens as pressure increases. You see this now as the Karens of the world, with no tangible benefit to themselves, willingly turn into mini-tyrants at any opportunity. There are Ken’s (male Karens) doing the same thing.
If, say, the head tyrants offer rewards to Karen’s-in-wait the number of mini-tyrants will expand. They never take into consideration that they too can become a victim of a Karen or Ken. They are blinded by their narcissism and arrogance are unable to think ahead about what could be. They are basal animals and their numbers will increase as the gates close further. Pressure doesn’t always create diamonds, sometimes it creates explosions.
The “increased pressure” is not creating more Karens but more red pilled types. Two weeks ago who would have guessed that “Let’s Go Brandon!” would be chanted by hundreds of thousands around the country. One week ago who would have guessed that a bunch of recently red pilled pilots would bring Southwest Airlines to its knees.
The optimum number of mask wearing jackasses, Karens and other assorted worthless busy-bodies has been reached. What such pressure does accomplish, however, is to reveal the real man. In normal times he was a pleasant neighbor whom you would have over for beers. Now he is a raving lunatic who hates your guts. Why? Just as wine shows the true man—in vino veritas—the insane politics of today show who your neighbor really always—always—was. And that information is useful indeed.
We just watched this movie last weekend with the nephews, one of whom hadn’t seen it before.
Funny how certain movies and shows seem more like documentaries than the fiction they purport to be.
Some film makers and writers have this eerie sense of where things are going. Call each a sort of Nostradamus; or better, a sort of Cassandra. Maybe laughed at in their own time, called paranoid or silly, now they are hailed as prophets. Dostoyevsky, Orwell, Kafka, Wells, Verne, Huxley, Solzhenitsyn are such men. “Hunger Games”, “Network”, “Anthem”, “A Canticle for Leibowitz”, “V For Vendetta”, “1984”, “Brave New World”, “The Road to Serfdom”, “Darkness at Noon” are such works.
There are many more, but there are never enough. But even the greatest prophet has no value in the present if he has no audience. It is only in the future that we recognize his footprints.
I’m intrigued with @Mike Austin’s idea that we might be approaching Peak A$$hole, but not optimistic. Meantimes, I gotta get me some of them sunglasses!
I love it: “Peak Asshole”.
We can define it as “that moment in time when the highest number of assholes is reached in any society experiencing rapid and increasing political, social and economic pressure. That number will tend to reduce as the society turns more and more volatile, though there is no time when the number of assholes reaches zero.”
Every Karen has now revealed herself. Every progressive has now revealed himself. Every government agency has now revealed itself. Every media outlet has now revealed itself. Every government bureaucrat has now revealed himself. No one is hiding any longer as there is nowhere to hide. There is no privacy as everything one does and everything one says is being recorded and remembered. The only thing left is to monitor your thoughts. They’re working on that.
See those birds in the sky? They are called Black Swans. Take cover.
The claws are out. The lines are drawn. Pieces have been put in place. We know who they are; they know who we are. The land is getting red hot. Fuel is being pumped into the border regions.
Anyone have a match?
Lens Theory in action!