Portland: Rose of the Northwest
![[UPDATED with animal identified]One Spark. Just One. And there will be a massacre in the streets.](https://americandigest.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/1tAIGv9e.jpeg "[UPDATED with animal identified]One Spark. Just One. And there will be a massacre in the streets.")
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WHEN in the course of human Events, it becomes necessary….
Welcome to the New American Digest: 2003-2020
Gerard Van der Leun
Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:
Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall
riprap of things:
Cobble of milky way.
straying planets,
These poems, people,
lost ponies with
Dragging saddles –
and rocky sure-foot trails.
The worlds like an endless
four-dimensional
Game of Go.
ants and pebbles
In the thin loam, each rock a word
a creek-washed stone
Granite: ingrained
with torment of fire and weight
Crystal and sediment linked hot
all change, in thoughts,
As well as things.
Gary Snyder
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.
Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.
This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.
— BY THEODORE ROETHKE
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.
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
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its a beautiful thing
Hilarious!
Well, it was a decent place forty years ago. There was a bit of a pipeline between several of Oregon’s unis and my alma mater’s School of Design back in the day, so I came to be friends with a few Landscape Artichokes, and would visit them infrequently after their graduation when I found myself on the left coast. The trajectory of its decline was visible in 1978, and unmistakable by the middle of the 80s, though even a cynic such as myself would have been hard pressed then to limn the depths to which the Rose City has descended, and they don’t look to be nearly finished.
I was born in Salem. Mountains and Coast. Unbelievable scenery. That a community of Fools, Halfwits, Arsonists and Thugs now roam freely is catastrophic.
It’s surprising how fast Portland declined. Up until the shutdown the wife and I enjoyed the many fine restaurants and bars. I never felt unsafe. And I work third shift in the central city. Until Gov Brownshirt shut that down and loosed her minions. Destroyed a food and hospitality scene that made life enjoyable. Turned the city core into Mogadishu on the Willamette. The sad part is how sanguine the majority of residents are with the situation. We’re now looking for a place in the hinterlands. Cash our retirements into ammo and supplies and pray the people come to their senses before things devolve into open gunplay.
Regarding the virtual fire drill:
I’m reminded of Bob Newhart and Norman Fell in Catch-22.
“I’ll be happy to see them when I’m not here. If I am here, then I’m not available for them to see me.”
Catch-22. It’s the best catch there is.
Acquaintance lives there, says it’s 10 miles from where they live, and they still do business a few blocks from ground zero. DW and I were there two years ago, and it was a decent downtown, but you could tell it was rotting under the skin.
They are continuing to enable their own destruction. It’s akin to suck-starting a shotgun.
Portland?…..or Orc-land? Meh.
Booking my trip to Portland as we speak!