
Strange days have found us And through their strange hours We linger alone Bodies confused Memories misused As we run from the day To a strange night of stone |
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Strange days have found us And through their strange hours We linger alone Bodies confused Memories misused As we run from the day To a strange night of stone |
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Address for Donations, Complaints, Brickbats, and — oh yes — Donations
In Memory Of W.B. Yeats
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
from “1054 AD”
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
Your Say
My Thinking Hat
My Back Pages
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Search American Digest’s Back Pages
The People Yes
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
Camouflage
Sourdough Mountain Lookout
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
Chimes of Freedom
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
The Vault
My Back Pages
Byzantium
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
De Breanski
VAN GOGH
Hillegas
To the Stonecutters
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
Real World Address for Donations, Mash Notes and Hate Mail
from “1054 AD”
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.
Strange days, indeed. Like some sort of cosmic Pandora’s Box has been open and everything is 180 degrees out of phase. I find I am simply weary of all of it. Want to kneel instead of stand for the anthem? Well, have at it asshole. Don’t know what flavah of human sexuality you are? Guess what: I couldn’t care less about you or your mental illness. Just stay the hell away from me. And the list of degenerate mis-fit toys goes on and on.
Interesting coincidence: Lately, I’ve been re-visiting another tasty Doors entree that really sums it up:
I need a brand new friend who doesn’t bother me
I need a brand new friend who doesn’t trouble me
I need someone, yeah, who doesn’t need me
Strange days, indeed.
The Crazy Years and more.
1984.
I’m delighted to be 80 and looking back, not 18 and looking ahead.
re: Dem’s debate
BIG WIND,HEAP DUST,NO RAIN.
I think you hit the nail perfectly, Gerard. This hand raising of the dems will be an iconic photo. One day, God forbid, the people in the new dark ages will look back and know that a democratic vote to kill our society was pivotal.
I’ve said this before, but I remain convinced that at least one reason why we are sliding into the Crazy Years is that anyone anywhere else but the deepest of jungles knows that it only takes one or two bad decisions to trigger Ragnarok. This has been the case for most of a lifetime, now, and it has to have seeped into the collective consciousness.
In my rear view mirror the sun is going down
Sinking behind bridges in the road
And I think of all the good things
That we have left undone
And I suffer premonitions
Confirm suspicions
Of the holocaust to come.
The wire that holds the cork
That keeps the anger in
Gives way
And suddenly it’s day again.
The sun is in the east
Even though the day is done.
Two suns in the sunset
Hmm
Could be the human race is run.
Like the moment when the brakes lock
And you slide towards the big truck
“Oh no!”
“Daddy, Daddy!”
You stretch the frozen moments with your fear.
And you’ll never hear their voices
And you’ll never see their faces
You have no recourse to the law anymore.
And as the windshield melts
My tears evaporate
Leaving only charcoal to defend.
Finally I understand the feelings of the few.
Ashes and diamonds
Foe and friend
We were all equal in the end.
Strange days indeed. Where we live everyone is busy stockpiling food. No joke. Whole Food has totally run out of quail eggs.
We needed to see this. All of it. We would not have believed it otherwise.
It Will get worse.
Richard’s Doors quotes hit the mark.
That bedroom. First glance,it was a gory crime scene. Closer inspection reveals rose embossed sheets.
“My tears evaporate leaving only charcoal to defend.”
No,we are not equal in the end. We’re not equal in the beginning or the middle.
Deal with it.
OK.
It’s drivin’ me nuts.
What’s the deal on the picture of the guys in white suits? Chernobyl? Sci fi? And why are the suits padlocked? I gots ta’ know!
JWM
Thank you Rabbit! Best laugh all week.
JWM,
The bunny suits look like asbestos to me. How about those four finger gloves!
I recently saw that photo of the Commie candidates with their hands raised. Might have seen it on AD but the things was captioned with “Who Wants To Lose The Election”? Each of them are the Devil’s own children if any ever existed and I think those fuckers only represent half of the pack that is begging for authority.
Preserving a democratic republic of free people requires a willingness to eradicate those who would destroy it and t’s simply too bad that US policy doesn’t demand that anyone who advocates or promotes their marxist platforms isn’t either lined up and shot or sent into exile, never to return.
The preposterous left hurts America so much. Could that be the plan? I have been alone a lot lately with my thoughts. And so I have come to wonder. Could the left’s collective insanity and consuming rage against conservatives have been visited upon them by the Good Lord Himself?
Most likely He loathes, in His way, the left for aborting babies.
January 22, 1973. Roe decided by a group of SCOTUS justices.
Say you are the Lord. You lovingly fashion conception as the point at which Your Grace and the love for Man come together and create a new being. Tiny and vulnerable yet in possession of that most miraculous thing, a soul. How can You, as the Lord God, bear the destruction of Your tiny new creation? It is one thing, and certainly bad enough, when an individual sins in this way. Forgiveness is a possibility for an individual. But when a collective, the left, unrepentant, pushes support for abortion in the abstract, thus opening the door wide for normalizing killing the unborn?
Well, isn’t God’s wrath is the stuff of legend?
If there is a God, heaven help the United States
These are interesting:
The Imaginative Conservative has a thoughtful series entitled Letters from Dante. These are essays on advice that ancient thinkers would give to people of today.
https://theimaginativeconservative.org/category/senior-contributors/louis-markos/letters-from-dante-series
Law and Liberty has an interesting series on Michael Anton’s “After the Flight 93 Election.”
https://www.lawliberty.org/2019/07/09/michael-anton-after-the-flight-93-election-symposium/
@ Jaynie Could the left’s collective insanity and consuming rage against conservatives have been visited upon them by the Good Lord Himself? +++++
Considering that most, if not all, of the Insane Left shares the common trait of being militantly atheistic, it seems to me that the self-induced God-sized hole in their psyches was quite predictably filled with all manner of lunacy. That these individuals who are hell-bent to live disordered lifestyles are now experiencing torrents of dis-ease, is only logical and to be expected.
Borrowing on your question, I recall an old adage that went something like, “Those who the gods would destroy, they first make mad.” It’s a pleasant thought. . Just make sure you’re viewing from a safe distance.
I recently stumbled upon an interesting book by David Mamet titled “The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture”. https://tinyurl.com/y3mpzxmv
Mamet makes numerous interesting points throughout his book. Among them was one I had never really considered. Specifically, what the left has attempted – and largely succeeded in doing – is to have removed predictability in our social relationships with one another. This must have a corrosive effect on our culture and society.