“There is a world dimensional for those untwisted by a love of things irreconcilable.”
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WHEN in the course of human Events, it becomes necessary….
Welcome to the New American Digest: 2003-2020
Gerard Van der Leun
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
His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o’clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.
— Eliot
I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this
air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their
parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.
— Walt Whitman
The scientists are in terror
and the European mind stops
Wyndham Lewis chose blindness
rather than have his mind stop.
Night under wind mid garofani,
the petals are almost still
Mozart, Linnaeus, Sulmona,
When one’s friends hate each other
how can there be peace in the world?
Their asperities diverted me in my green time.
A blown husk that is finished
but the light sings eternal
a pale flare over marshes
where the salt hay whispers to tide’s change
Time, space,
neither life nor death is the answer.
And of man seeking good,
doing evil.
In meiner Heimat
where the dead walked
and the living were made of cardboard.
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Snow makes my Shannon go insane. She thinks it is a thing and it’s going to get her. When I say, “Let’s go get some snow!”, she jumps high and twisting like a Marlin.
She growls at the snow, daring it to try to get her, then she hunkers down and dives right in, tunneling a few feet then emerges and runs away to the far end of the yard maybe 200′. Then all the way back at full speed. Over and over.
For about 10 mins then she stops and looks at me with her pleading eyes. The snow pulls it’s secret weapon on Shannon and wins every time. Her feets are cold. REAL cold. And it’s too late to do anything about it. Like when you eat ice cream real fast – all you can do is ride it out.
So I go over there and pick her up, all 47 lbs worth, and tuck her frozen feets inside my down vest. We go in my office and I drop her on her Real Tree blanky next to the propane heater and soon she is back to normal, ready to go outside again and “Let’s get some snow!”
Spring
That video depicts what my wife and I have as surroundings to a T. The mountains by us are bigger (Northern Rockies) but all else is as it is, or was until a few weeks ago.
Thank you for posting this Gerard. Perfect Everly Brothers as well.
Blood harmony.