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The Autumn People

by Vanderleun on September 22, 2020

“For some, autumn comes early, stays late through life… For these beings, fall is the ever normal season, the only weather, there be no choice beyond. Where do they come from? The dust. Where do they go? The grave. Does blood stir in their veins? No: the night wind. What ticks in their head? The worm. What speaks from their mouth? The toad. What sees from their eyes? The snake. What hears with their ear? The abyss between the stars. They sift the human storm for souls, eat flesh of reason, fill tombs with sinners. They frenzy forth. In gusts they beetle-scurry, creep, thread, filter, motion, make all moons sullen, and surely cloud all clear-run waters. The spider-web hears them, trembles- breaks. Such are the autumn people. Beware of them.”

— Ray Bradbury

VIA the followed and esteemed Cultural Offering

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Comments on this entry are closed.

ghostsniper September 22, 2020, 6:00 PM

The gov’t protects these criminals.
In a sane world they would have long ago been severely beaten.

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Zaphod September 22, 2020, 6:36 PM

Nobel Prize for Lit. to whoever first came up with the term ‘Bugmen’.

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Anonymous September 22, 2020, 11:42 PM

Bradbury was a poet? Had no idea. Thanks for sharing.

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gwbnyc September 23, 2020, 7:28 AM

Hickenlooper.

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DrTedNelson September 23, 2020, 9:11 AM

Such a wonderful montage of mediocre mendacity.

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Vanderleun September 23, 2020, 9:14 AM

Nothing but the best for my people!

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Vanderleun September 23, 2020, 8:45 PM

High marks for “mediocre mendacity.”

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Welcome to the New American Digest: 2003-2020

from EAST COKER — Eliot

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

Beneath the Aegean

When all Earth’s seas shall Levitate,
Dark shawled within the skies,
Upon our eyes will Starfish dance
Their waltz of Blind surprise.

The sun will Rise within wine Dark
As Argonauts imbibed,
Whose drunken arms embrace that sleep
Where Phaeton’s horses Stride.

Upon all of Earth’s wind-sanded shores,
As dolphins Learn to soar,
All we once were on the land
Shall be sealed behind the door

Of Ivory and Chastened Gold,
That the Mystery solved complete
Shall never til the seas’ Long fall
Wake mariners from their sleep.

— Van der Leun

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

— The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T. S. Eliot

My Back Pages

Van der Leun: The Normblog Bio of Your Host“From a student radical/hippie/leftist of the Free Speech Movement/Vietnam Day Commitee era and a full-on Democratic Liberal in the decades after, I think I’ve evolved a politics that is neither right nor left but is, in its elemental nature, draconian. In the last 20 years, I’ve taken apart my beliefs with a sledgehammer. Now I’ve got to put the surviving parts back together with tweezers and other ‘shabby equipment, always deteriorating’.”