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: 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
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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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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!