A look at the deeper background from a balanced perspective.
Crazy? Really? Let’s See.
A look at the deeper background from a balanced perspective.
Crazy? Really? Let’s See.
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Address for Donations, Complaints, Brickbats, and — oh yes — Donations
My Back Pages
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
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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.
He’s shredding american financed virus factories.
And more to the point, “Why do we give a shit?”
https://www.warhistoryonline.com/war-articles/russia-ukraine-relations.html?firefox=1
Yeah, I’m Uked out. We have reached a point where I know that wherever we take a side, it’s the wrong side or a wrong side. At that point the propaganda spigit is attached to a fire hose.
After Adolf flipped off Neville in Czechoslovakia he held a fine parade in Berlin but it did not go without notice that the crowds were not so enthusiastic as they once were. Here’s hoping the American crowd gets downright sullen.
At least he cares about his backyard.
Unlike the US and the Polly-tit-cians
We should be doing the same damn thing to Mexico
100miles in.
Its a failed 3rd world cartell hell hole and a National Security threat to the US and the World.
So you want 100 miles into Mexico? Is that depopulation or just controlling the energy and water to the region? Do you imagine any buffer—say, ten miles—between the US and Mexican border that would be made barren and well-planted with mines? A buffer would be absolutely necessary, by the way. A “no man’s land”, if you will. Mexico began this invasion, let Mexico bear the cost of it.
As far as the cartels are concerned , that is another though related issue. A ten mile buffer zone would go a long way toward keeping these demons away.
A fair amount of my army time in germany (74-77) was spent on that border with live ammo. The post I was stationed at, Wildflecken, was 5km from that border. The largest US army base in the world is Ft Hood Tx, so why aren’t those soldiers there guarding the southern border? There’s a few other military bases close to the border too and all of them should have soldiers on that border. The soldiers are being paid already, why not have them earn it by protecting the country. I’ve wondered this for 40 years.
I am half-Mexican but 100 percent American. There is no cure for the canker sore that is the Mexican polity. It must be quarantined from any possible contact with the US. Close the border. Create a buffer zone of at least ten miles. Treat it like the DMZ between North and South Korea. Cease all transfers of money between the US and Mexico. Close all consulates.
And let’s not have any nonsense about the teeming millions of illegals here in the US. Send them all back—one way or another. Weaklings protest how impossible that would be. More nonsense. We sent 1,000,000 illegals back to Mexico during “Operation Wetback” (1954).
What Mexico has done is a declaration of war. We should respond likewise.
wasnt there treaties between russia and the ukraine where the ukraine ceded territory to russia and then reneged on the deal? think i heard or read something like that
Watched both videos. The 2nd one noting invading the Ukraine is a significant overreaction. True if you take the narrow view but if you see it as a strike against globalism perhaps a precise surgical slash halting the cancerous spread. The 24/7 propaganda suggests it’s not the Ukraine versus Russia, it’s more Russia vs the new world order.
What does Putin want? Why not ask him? … or read what he said he wants. It’s in English at The Frontier Post, a Pakistani newspaper, in which he proposes Russia, China, India, Brazil, Argentina, Malaysia, Africa, and the Islamic countries build an alternate banking system outside western borders and western reach.
Seeing as how Russia is already paying off debts with dollar-linked rubles (worth next to nothing now) and transferring the nations finances to a ‘China backed’ credit system, maybe, just maybe, the West should be paying more attention to this.
[Apologies for lack of documentation, but Google Translate is refusing to work on RIA.RU, the official Russian government newspaper, where a good bit of Russian policy and stuff is published. Mushrooms, we are treated like mushrooms.]