Something Wonderful: How to Make An Heirloom
Next post: Let’s Review 63: Hello Darkest My Old Friend Edition
Previous post: In the House of Stone and Light
WHEN in the course of human Events, it becomes necessary….
Welcome to the New American Digest: 2003-2020
Gerard Van der Leun
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.
Comments on this entry are closed.
When I was very young we lived with my grandparents. In their bathroom was a small stool my greatgrandfather had made for my mother when she was 3 or 4. I loved that little stool so when my oldest was four I made him a stool as close to a copy of my mother’s as I could remember. Over the next 15 years I had 3 more kids and each one got a stool like the original. My 7 year old grandson broke his Dad’s stool a week ago and just 5 minutes ago I finished the repair. My hope is that my greatgrand children will use those stools one day just as I did.
They HAVE a hammer. Oh, the JOY!
That was wonderful.
Dude’s got some bad sanders. That’s some hammering kids! Kids bothering you? Just hand them some nails and send them out to the porch. Next the craftsman needs to make them some real framing hammers 🙂
OMG! How dare adults let kids have such a dangerous implement! I’m shocked! (not really, every kid needs a hammer)
I must have mis-heard him when he said he was making a hammer for his grandson.
A repurposed hammer! What a nice gift for a 6 year old.
The gentleman in the video has an awesome shop and is incredibly talented.
The torch “heat tempers” the wood.
Didn’t show it but he probably wiped it down with 4-0 steel wool afterward to smooth it out and lessen the soot. Nice. Most people would have thrown it away. Now it’ll keep working another 100 years.
Hopefully the little girl learns to not leave tools out in the weather, it saves on re-furbing or replacing.