[HT: The Sailor]
WHEN in the course of human Events, it becomes necessary….
![The Shield of Achilles -- Auden [emphasis added]](https://americandigest.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/shieldtop-150x150.jpg "The Shield of Achilles -- Auden [emphasis added]")
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
FSA/8d22000/8d224008d22491a.tif
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
Comments on this entry are closed.
Truly “Something Wonderful”! Thank you!
Had no idea people still danced the Shag but this pair are amazing!
That was my Wife and me, 25+ years prior to ’03; though I insisted on no “public displays of emotion”. … Her life ended. … And, I am crying at this moment. … But, Thank You, for posting that.
Bless you and your wife’s memory.
In 1983 I worked in South Carolina and the ladies tried their best to teach this northern boy to shag dance. Didn’t work but I still appreciate watching. And Carolina girls are the best.
Watching Leslie dance gives me goosebumps and a case of envy. Soo much fun there –
Something else wonderful: Stardust
Just lovely, through and through.
Yes, Julie, lovely through and through. Thank you.
Indeed!
Awesome. 100% Awesome. I wonder what ever happened to them.
Look up Leslie Melton Jennings. Still dancing away.
Same with Grant.
Something wonderful, indeed.
Thank you. Leslie is perfect. What great memories, and what a nice reprieve from Black Distemper Month.
That was something wonderful, Gerard, and the young lady, Leslie, has a most beguiling figure.
Yes, lovely.
Come to NC and you can get all the lessons you want, it remains very popular here and in SC.
Cheers y’all.
Back in the early ’50s I as a pre-teen, went from Miami up to a summer camp in the North Carolina mountains (Unaccompanied minor, by train, weren’t no thang, back in the day.). Found the Shag, Charleston, Black Bottom were still quite popular dances there. Glad to see they’re still preserving some of our popular history.
Someone once said: Woman, thou art dance! So very true.
Did you notice how perfect their posture is? I love to see that, since mine has been poor most of my life. Dancers have impeccable posture. They looked so smooth and cool.
Leslie is so talented, so beautiful.
A wistful note from a wistful putz!
I could be wrong, but that distinct loose-limbed, leg-shakiness – maybe an influence on early, ‘56 Elvis? Maybe that kind of lankiness in dance is uniquely Southern and widely imitated?
That was from 2003. I DuckDuckGo’ed Grant Garmon. He went on to have a career in the military and then in law enforcement.
https://vajrshaggersinc.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Grant-Garmon-VJSHOF-2017.pdf
Fabulous post, hits me hard, I don’t know where to start.
As a young fool in the 1960s I resisted all efforts by my parents to get me to learn to dance. It was “boring” compared to TV and movies.
3 years ago my wife asked me, for the third time, to do ballroom dancing lessons with her. I agreed, under protest and unwillingly, because the reason was to dance at our oldest son’s wedding.
I have since learned…
-TV is shite, including all the double shite from netflix, amazon and their ilk.
-People with nothing to do in the evenings get into trouble with booze, and other nonsense easily predicted by the old aphorism about “idle hands”
-Dancing 4 nights a week:
-leaves no time for drinking or other mischief.
-keeps the weight down.
-drops the blood pressure seriously, I damn well mean seriously, big time, all you lumps out there listen up.
-Improves the after hours life, know what I mean, a nod’s as good as a wink…
-Demonstrates that all one’s silly ideas of being well coordinated are silly.
-Makes me the amateur over 65 King of the Cha Cha and runner up of the Tango in the podunk town where I live.
Until dancing in some form revives, civilization is doomed. We are monkeys. If we wont dance, we are very bad monkeys, doomed to fail.
I intend to learn the basics of Shag dancing pronto. Looks a lot like a fast “Bolero”. Google it, you undancing losers.
I met my girlfriend in a samba class more than 25 years ago. We never did the shag, but we danced just about every other ballroom dance we could get lessons in (we even took Paso Doble lessons once, but it was never played at the local social dances) until she couldn’t. She died just before the lockdowns eased here in Colorado. I haven’t danced since, because the studio only just opened up, and they’re only allowing couples who are vaxxed to sign up, and I’m neither.