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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
Comments on this entry are closed.
I’m gonna be praying, and praying hard, that the L-rd gives every one of these demon bastards cancer of the asshole so huge that their guts fall out and drag behind them; that their every joint swells with gout and makes them scream in agony; that the blood flow to their face stops and they die with a bare skull and hanging shreds; that the little prick Jamie falls down the stairs, crushes his cervical vertebrae and lies helpless for 30 years under the care of a sadist; that every traitor, every commie, every coward, and every smug son of a bitch falls under a harrow and is dragged across the field and shredded; that they boil in burning pitch.
Pain without end, Amen.
forwarded/multiple recipients.
no one is coming to save us.
I heed the words of Orwell in that closing shot. I am not allowing it to happen. I don’t wear a mask. I go into grocery stores maskless, sometimes I’m denied entry, but very seldom. I’m often the only one wandering around amoung 500 others. I tell everyone who inquires that this flu is total bullshit. I will not respect ignorance and cowardice. I’ve lost plenty of friends since February… friends who believe the bullshit. Happy slaves… or fearful slaves… they’re all slaves.
“Mask up, Buddy”
“F*CK YOU.”
End of discussion.
JWM
We have no one to blame but ourselves!
Gary Barnett has written an item that underlines the warnings of Huxley and Orwell, namely, compliance and mindless obedience will be the suicide of everyone. Stop obeying. The first and easiest thing to do is toss the masks. Start somewhere. tinyurl.com/1oolzox0
@ Lance That my friend is one of the greatest comments I have ever read at any site. There are many great commenters here at AT.
My wife and myself are non mask, free thinkers. Dangerous to commie society. No smart phones either.
I’m with you Terry. (And the Lance of whom you speak.)
jwm:
“Mask up, Buddy”
“F*CK YOU.”
End of discussion.
Not quite. Add: “Then get the f*ck out.”
@ Fletcher…. Get the f*ck out of where? The area the believers congregate? I’m not a believer, I’m a breather. You need the vaxx, Fletcher. We all could use more parking spaces.
I don’t wear a mask. Tried it, didn’t like it.
If a place demands I wear a mask, I have a thin black balaclava (ski mask with no nose or mouth holes) that covers all the way down to the base of my neck. Smoke-lens shooting glasses go over it “to protect my eyes from airborne germs.” And usually with black leather gloves on. (for the cold weather)
I actually enjoy wearing it, as it generates some pretty hilarious reactions- people see a 6’4″, (6’5″ in work boots) 224 pound guy dressed like that, and sometimes part like the Red Sea in the Ten Commandments movie.
What good is a “pandemic” if you can’t have some fun with it?
Nothing against prayers but torches, pitchforks, tar, feathers, decorated lampposts, ……
The mask tyrants include the support of two thirds of women. As a man said, women value consensus and will close ranks to strangle dissent. It’s how they are wired biologically. Our rulers understand this very well and have organized them to respond to their malevolent plans. I don’t think we’ve seen the bottom of this. In anything.
@james wilson
Dead on. It’s also why giving women the vote was the beginning of our demise. It’s also why merely stating this fact is so swiftly and viciously attacked.
There is nothing new under the sun. Today’s nonconforming contrarians morph into tomorrow’s enforcers and the former enforcers are reduced to resentful subversives plotting to take charge. The answers to what is faced, and what has been faced for as long as mortal man has existed, is found in religion and especially in Christianity but real religion and especially Christianity are very unpopular precisely because to sincerely engage in the practice is to chafe powerfully against one’s own pride and this is both humiliating and painful when first undertaken so most don’t even try and of those who do many abandon the effort as just too hard.
Once upon a time the majority in the west proclaimed their Christian faith and even fought wars in defense of it. But the simple fact is that never at any time have actual practicing Christians constituted more than a tiny percentage of the people. Most are, most of the time, actually practicing atheists who have no intention of any will being done but their own. It has ever been thus and it will continue as such until such time as our Savior makes his second entrance into this world. Those who have accepted Him as savior and king will find forgiveness and peace. Those who do not will receive their just reward.