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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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Nice word: Nullification. Constitutionally speaking, “nullification” has been around in the USA for more than 230 years. Take a look at Jefferson’s and Madison’s “Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions” (1798).
“The resolutions argued that the states had the right and the duty to declare unconstitutional those acts of Congress that the Constitution did not authorize. In doing so, they argued for states’ rights and strict construction of the Constitution.”
The idea was that any state legislature could declare any law passed by the US Congress that said state considered unconstitutional as “absolutely null and utterly void.” Thus that state would be under no legal or moral obligation to enforce such a law.
Nullification has been for some years slowly creeping into the mindset of Americans, especially where firearms and taxation and energy and abortion are concerned. If some state—Nebraska for example—considered any ban on oil drilling to be unconstitutional then that state could drill to its heart’s content. The same with firearms. If some 3 letter agency issues some diktat restricting in whatever fashion the 2nd Amendment, then any state could tell that agency to go have sex with itself.
Imagine the possibilities! Each state would be free to enforce whatever law it considered constitutional, and to nullify any law it considered unconstitutional. The states would then revert to what they were supposed to be from the formation of our Republic: “laboratories of democracy”. The 9th and 10th Amendments would actually mean something.
The word for this is Liberty. And one outcome of each state claiming the power of nullification would be the complete impotence of the Supreme Court—John Marshall be damned. Which he already is.
In my opinion the feds main buttress blocking nullification by states is money. 36% of Oklahoma’s state funds is federal revenue, Alaska, it’s 50%, for the great majority of states it’s at least a third of their revenue according to Pew Trusts. You children better not get too uppity or else we, the feds, will stop giving a fraction of the money we took away from your citizens back to you!
I’ve often heard state legislators say, “We can’t do that, the feds will withhold…!”
Pretty big stick the feds have to make states toe the latest line.
Perhaps, but states got along just fine before FDR, LBJ and Nixon without oceans of federal monies. America had excellent schools, no income tax and we won all our wars. We were free then.
Any national cataclysm—civil war being only one possibility, losing a world war would be another—would end the federal blackjack over the states. The federal government would not then have the power to threaten anybody. Most of state and federal spending is at any rate an absolute waste. It would hardly be noticed except by our parasites, who would over time simply disappear.
Once you become noticed, or once “they” arrive at your door, you’ve lost the present battle.
I live in a rather well defensible place, and the whole county is majority good guys. Very. well. armed. good guys. The Hole In The Wall Gang, so top speak.
My state is hard to imagine as a Nullify State – rather, it is hard left on the other side of the mountains from me. But, the idea of re-locating to a Nullify State is odious – I’m well established and well entrenched here.
Besides, much of the conflict we now face is an information conflict. It could go kinetic in a minute, but there is an enormous amount of friction that keeps the feds in their own lanes for now.