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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.
Gerard Van der Leun
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“Graves, eh? You had it really good. We’d have loved to have our da dancing on our grave. They would just pile our corpses under an old broken down beer wagon behind the sewer works.”
When John Cleese and Graham Chapman (the two inside guys) went on to form Monty Python’s Flying Circus, they adapted this sketch for their live show. I remember as a teenager hearing a tape of them performing it, and laughing so hard my sides hurt for hours afterwards. The routine NAILS the we-had-it-tough rhetoric that so many of us indulge in our later years, as well as the eternal guy-group impulse to one-up each other’s anecdotes.
Rubbish! Aye had it much worse!
You had it much worse?
Haw, I had it even liverwurst and had liverworts all over my body!
Thinking about it the liverworts didn’t have it easy either; life of a liverwort starts from the germination of a haploid spore to produce a protonema, which is either a mass of thread-like filaments or else a flattened thallus. The protonema is a transitory stage in the life of a liverwort, from which will grow the mature gametophore.
I always liked Marty Feldman – didn’t know he used to perform with Cleese.
“What hump?’
Gerard: You nailed it.
Group is already infiltrated by the feds, hey?
JV, fuck the Feds. “ Their” terrified of freedom loving Americans,,,,,,
But then I’m not sure which is worse, feds posing as patriots,,,,,,,,,,or patriots, posing as patriots? Can be sooooo confusing sometimes
VI
My only problem with the video is that it cuts out the very beginning of the sketch and what’s worse, they leave off the punch line! “And you try an’ tell th’ young people of today that. They won’t believe yez!” Otherwise classic comedy. I always thought Tim Brooke-Taylor was very underrated. Loved him in “The Goodies”.
Up all night thinking about my predicament, the real problem has to be Patriots, posing as Patriots!
Fear not ,,, I’ve a solution anybody under suspicion,,,,,we water board with Carlo Rossi’s cheapest red wine. Not even the most devout pretend patriots can pass that definitive test.
Problem solved!
VI