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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
Van der Leun: The Normblog Bio of Your Host
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
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Gerard, I think the cat train toy is a kind of homage to Tama, a Japanese cat who became the honorary stationmaster of a train on the Wakayama Line in Kishi Prefecture in 2007. Her appointment as stationmaster led to a 10% increase in ridership on the Wakayama Line. In 2010, the station building at Kishi was remodeled to look like a cat’s face. Tama died in 2015 at the cat equivalent of 80 human years but has been succeeded by two cat assistants and a deputy named Nitama.
Per Wikipedia: “After her passing, thousands of her fans from all over Japan came to pay their respect. She was honored with a Shinto-style funeral at the station and was given the posthumous title, ‘Honorary Eternal Stationmaster.’ She was enshrined at a nearby Shinto cat shrine as spirit goddess Tama Daimyōjin on August 11, 2015. . . . Nitama’s first official duty was to be conveyed to her predecessor’s shrine to pay her respects.”
Photos of Tama, her assistants and deputy, the Wakayama train painted to look like a cat, the Kishi Station after remodeling, and the Shinto shrine to Tama at the link:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tama_(cat)
I hope you don’t volunteer Miss Olive to be the feline face of California High-Speed Rail.
Absotively nyet!
Wandering ’round the net, looking for a bit more background on Tama, the Station Master cat in Japan, I somehow ended up reading about a little publication called The Organ, made on San Fran, edited by some guy called van der Leun.
Reading Richard Lupoff’s intro to The Organ Reader, http://www.ramblehouse.com/organreaderchapter.htm , leave me wondering if that guy van der Leun, was nuked too much, not enough, or just right. 😉
IF I had a cat, I just might get one.
IF.
Hmmm … my kittie my actually like that thing … hmmm
Gerard, you and Miss Olive might enjoy Neko Cafe, aka Cat Cafe the movie; Miss Olive can view it from her perch in the Cat Train that I’m sure you have on order for her.
“In Akihabara, Sakura Sakuragi (Yurika Kubo) runs cat cafe “Mocha.” She listens to her customers’ troubles there. The various customers that enter her cafe also take comfort in the cats that reside there.” https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9703882/?ref_=nv_sr_1?ref_=nv_sr_1
I’d tell you what I thought of it, but alas! I haven’t yet found any subtitles, and my Japanese is quite limited (i.e. nonexistent) so I can’t, at least not yet!
Jim in Alaska…. Yes I was nuked far far too much… far far af faaa rrrr toooo moooch!@@$#%$
Cats like boxes with escape holes and lookouts, and humans like watching cats in cute situations.