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
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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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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!