(feel that sultry heat; it's a ray charles day)
Sunday, July 17, 2011
Saturday, July 16, 2011
EARTH ~
Adonis ( Ali Ahmad Said Esber )
CELEBRATING CHILDHOOD
Even the wind wants
to become a cart
pulled by butterflies.
I remember madness
leaning for the first time
on the mind's pillow.
I was talking to my body then
and my body was an idea
I wrote in red.
Red is the sun's most beautiful throne
and all the other colors
worship on red rugs.
Night is another candle.
In every branch, an arm,
a message carried in space
echoed by the body of the wind.
The sun insists on dressing itself in fog
when it meets me:
Am I being scolded by the light?
Oh, my past days —
they used to walk in their sleep
and I used to lean on them.
Love and dreams are two parentheses.
Between them I place my body
and discover the world.
Many times
I saw the air fly with two grass feet
and the road dance with feet made of air.
My wishes are flowers
staining my days.
I was wounded early,
and early I learned
that wounds made me.
I still follow the child
who still walks inside me.
Now he stands at a staircase made of light
searching for a corner to rest in
and to read the face of night again.
If the moon were a house,
my feet would refuse to touch its doorstep.
They are taken by dust
carrying me to the air of seasons.
I walk,
one hand in the air,
the other caressing tresses
that I imagine.
A star is also
a pebble in the field of space.
He alone
who is joined to the horizon
can build new roads.
A moon, an old man,
his seat is night
and light is his walking stick.
What shall I say to the body I abandoned
in the rubble of the house
in which I was born?
No one can narrate my childhood
except those stars that flicker above it
and that leave footprints
on the evening path.
My childhood is still
being born in the psalms of a light
whose name I do not know
and who names me.
Out of that river he made a mirror
and asked it about his sorrow.
He made rain out of his grief
and imitated the clouds.
Your childhood is a village.
You will never cross its boundaries
no matter how far you go.
His days are lakes,
his memories floating bodies.
You who are descending
from the mountains of the past,
how can you climb them again,
and why?
Time is a door
I cannot open.
My magic is worn,
my chants asleep.
I was born in a village,
small and secretive like a womb.
I never left it.
I love the ocean not the shores.
Poet, philosopher and essayist born in Qasabin Syria in 1930.
From seventeen adopted the pseudonym Adonis.
He is considered the epitome of contemporary Arabic poetry.
CELEBRATING CHILDHOOD
Even the wind wants
to become a cart
pulled by butterflies.
I remember madness
leaning for the first time
on the mind's pillow.
I was talking to my body then
and my body was an idea
I wrote in red.
Red is the sun's most beautiful throne
and all the other colors
worship on red rugs.
Night is another candle.
In every branch, an arm,
a message carried in space
echoed by the body of the wind.
The sun insists on dressing itself in fog
when it meets me:
Am I being scolded by the light?
Oh, my past days —
they used to walk in their sleep
and I used to lean on them.
Love and dreams are two parentheses.
Between them I place my body
and discover the world.
Many times
I saw the air fly with two grass feet
and the road dance with feet made of air.
My wishes are flowers
staining my days.
I was wounded early,
and early I learned
that wounds made me.
I still follow the child
who still walks inside me.
Now he stands at a staircase made of light
searching for a corner to rest in
and to read the face of night again.
If the moon were a house,
my feet would refuse to touch its doorstep.
They are taken by dust
carrying me to the air of seasons.
I walk,
one hand in the air,
the other caressing tresses
that I imagine.
A star is also
a pebble in the field of space.
He alone
who is joined to the horizon
can build new roads.
A moon, an old man,
his seat is night
and light is his walking stick.
What shall I say to the body I abandoned
in the rubble of the house
in which I was born?
No one can narrate my childhood
except those stars that flicker above it
and that leave footprints
on the evening path.
My childhood is still
being born in the psalms of a light
whose name I do not know
and who names me.
Out of that river he made a mirror
and asked it about his sorrow.
He made rain out of his grief
and imitated the clouds.
Your childhood is a village.
You will never cross its boundaries
no matter how far you go.
His days are lakes,
his memories floating bodies.
You who are descending
from the mountains of the past,
how can you climb them again,
and why?
Time is a door
I cannot open.
My magic is worn,
my chants asleep.
I was born in a village,
small and secretive like a womb.
I never left it.
I love the ocean not the shores.
ADONIS
Selected Poems
(Yale/Margellos, 2010)
translated from the Arabic by Khaled Mattawa
Selected Poems
(Yale/Margellos, 2010)
translated from the Arabic by Khaled Mattawa
Poet, philosopher and essayist born in Qasabin Syria in 1930.
From seventeen adopted the pseudonym Adonis.
He is considered the epitome of contemporary Arabic poetry.
Friday, July 15, 2011
EARTH ~
CELEBRATING DEATH
Death arrives from the back
even when it comes before us.
Only life confronts.
The eye is a road
and the road is an intersection.
A child plays with life,
an old man leans on it.
The tongue rusts from excess of speech,
and the eye dries from lack of dreams.
Wrinkles —
grooves on the face,
potholes in the heart.
A body — half doorstep,
half incline.
His head is a butterfly
with a single wing.
The sky reads you
after death writes you.
The sky has two breasts;
from them all people suckle
every moment, every place.
The human being is a book
life reads continuously,
and death reads in an instant,
and only once.
What about this city?
In it dawn appears like a walking stick
in a darkness named Time.
Spring came to the garden of the house,
laid down his suitcases
and started giving them to the trees
under a rain falling from his arms.
Why is the poet always mistaken?
Spring gives him its leaves
and he gives them to ink.
Our existence is a slope
and we live to climb it.
I congratulate you, sand.
You are the only one who can pour
water and mirage
into the same bowl.
Poet, philosopher and essayist born in Qasabin Syria in 1930.
From seventeen adopted the pseudonym Adonis.
He is considered the epitome of contemporary Arabic poetry.
CELEBRATING DEATH
Death arrives from the back
even when it comes before us.
Only life confronts.
The eye is a road
and the road is an intersection.
A child plays with life,
an old man leans on it.
The tongue rusts from excess of speech,
and the eye dries from lack of dreams.
Wrinkles —
grooves on the face,
potholes in the heart.
A body — half doorstep,
half incline.
His head is a butterfly
with a single wing.
The sky reads you
after death writes you.
The sky has two breasts;
from them all people suckle
every moment, every place.
The human being is a book
life reads continuously,
and death reads in an instant,
and only once.
What about this city?
In it dawn appears like a walking stick
in a darkness named Time.
Spring came to the garden of the house,
laid down his suitcases
and started giving them to the trees
under a rain falling from his arms.
Why is the poet always mistaken?
Spring gives him its leaves
and he gives them to ink.
Our existence is a slope
and we live to climb it.
I congratulate you, sand.
You are the only one who can pour
water and mirage
into the same bowl.
ADONIS
Selected Poems
(Yale/Margellos, 2010)
translated from the Arabic by Khaled Mattawa
Selected Poems
(Yale/Margellos, 2010)
translated from the Arabic by Khaled Mattawa
Poet, philosopher and essayist born in Qasabin Syria in 1930.
From seventeen adopted the pseudonym Adonis.
He is considered the epitome of contemporary Arabic poetry.
HE WAS A POET ~
Roberts Blossom
March 25, 1924-8 July 2011
March 25, 1924-8 July 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/13/arts/roberts-blossom-quirky-character-actor-dies-at-87.html?src=recg
one of the great spirits, farewell
one of the great spirits, farewell
Thursday, July 14, 2011
BIOMETRICS ~
(will make sure we are all prisoners)
(will make sure we are all prisoners)
The Look of Love
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/14/world/asia/14identity.html?_r=1&ref=global-home
photo : Rodrigo Abd/Associated Press
Monday, July 11, 2011
EARTH ~
Rodolfo Enrique Facundo Cabral
was born on May 22, 1937 in Buenos Aires
then soon moved to Tierra del Fuego ~
writer, folk legend, friend of Borges
assassinated in Guatemala 9 July 2011
was born on May 22, 1937 in Buenos Aires
then soon moved to Tierra del Fuego ~
writer, folk legend, friend of Borges
assassinated in Guatemala 9 July 2011
“I was without a voice until I was 9, illiterate until I was 14, became a widower at 40 and only met my father when I was 46.”
Sunday, July 10, 2011
WITH ME ~
Manuel Galbán has passed away (b. 1931)
"Born in 1931 in the small fishing town of Gibara, Cuba, Mr. Galbán began his professional career — playing piano and drums as well as guitar — with the Villa Blanca Orchestra in 1944. He moved to Havana in 1956 and joined Los Zafiros in 1963. After leaving Los Zafiros in 1972 (the group disbanded shortly afterward), he worked with Cuba’s national music ensemble and toured for more than two decades with Grupo Batey."
New York Times
photo : montuno.com
Manuel Galbán has passed away (b. 1931)
"Born in 1931 in the small fishing town of Gibara, Cuba, Mr. Galbán began his professional career — playing piano and drums as well as guitar — with the Villa Blanca Orchestra in 1944. He moved to Havana in 1956 and joined Los Zafiros in 1963. After leaving Los Zafiros in 1972 (the group disbanded shortly afterward), he worked with Cuba’s national music ensemble and toured for more than two decades with Grupo Batey."
New York Times
photo : montuno.com
Friday, July 8, 2011
WITH ME ~
During the colorful and splendid coronation of the Mikado held in Kyoto toward the end of the year 1915 a gold medal and ribbon known as the Sho-shii, which is the fourth class of the junior rank of court, was conferred on Lafcadio Hearn under his Japanese name Koizumi Yakumo. But this honor came too late. Lafcadio Hearn had already been dead for over ten years. And what honor could there be for a departed spirit who, even during his mortal life, dwelt in the weird ghostly realms of his imagination?
His strange name came from one of the Greek Ionian islands, Leucedia, which is pronounced Lafcadio. Here he was born in the year 1850, the son of an Irish surgeon serving in the English Army of Occupation and a Greek girl mother. Six years later the little family moved to Ireland, but here they were not very happy. The call of the East was too strong for them to resist. The little mother soon abandoned her husband and child, ran off to seek a warmer and happier clime, married again and ended up going to Asia Minor. The father also married again, turned Lafcadio over to the care of a great-aunt, and left for India. Many, many years later, Lafcadio Hearn himself abandoned western civilization and found a home in Japan.
His education was strictly religious. He was first sent to Jesuit school in the north of France and later to a Roman Catholic college in the north of England. Here he acquired his haunting horror of Gothic cathedrals and conventional beliefs. The idea that ghosts lurked in the dark corners of old churches took hold of him and was greater than his fear of Hell. He soon lost his religion. An accident caused him to lose his sight of one eye and this misfortune greatly influenced his entire life, for the eye that remained was very defective and near-sighted. The vivid world of reality faded before him, the pictures that make up life became dim, the sun became clouded over with a milky film, and he was ready for the life in the ghostly spheres of his own imagination -- the life that was later dedicated to a literature of rare magic beauty.
At sixteen or seventeen, we find him in London suffering from illness and extreme poverty. We find him sleeping in a hayloft for the sake of the heat rising from the well-fed horses in the stalls below.
At nineteen, he was penniless in New York serving as a waiter and sleeping in the parks, and at twenty, he had wandered out to Cincinnati and was working first as a messenger and then as a peddler of mirrors for a Syrian merchant. Mirrors for Cincinnati from a young, wall-eyed peddler who could himself reflect the strange, dark phosphorescent beauty of the Orient!
He had other jobs but lost them all. At every stroke he met defeat and soon he lost his courage and with that he became timid and afraid. He was afraid of the real world, which he could see but for dimly as though it were a haunting ghost. But at night, when all was still and peaceful and the inhabitants of the prosperous and enterprising city were snug in their beds, then he marched forth into the kingdom of this imagination, into the fairyland that he conjured up in his romantic brain . . . then he crawled, half-starved, into a rusty boiler, that lay among the rubbish of vacant lot, and went to sleep.
His first start in the field of letters came several years later when he secured work on a newspaper. His extreme shyness prevented him from doing general reporting; and, apropos of this, the editor of the paper once remarked that if Hearn was sent to interview anyone, the person would have to come out into the street and invite him into the house or he would come back to the office empty-handed. But he soon distinguished himself in the reporting of a horrible murder. The ghost and corpse set his imagination working, and from these companion spirits, he had nothing to fear. More work, allowing play for his marvelously vivid descriptive powers, followed and for a time he was almost comfortable, when suddenly he lost his job, and, owing to an illegal marriage contracted with a negress, had to leave Cincinnati.
New Orleans seemed warmer and in character closer to the Orient. Here he walked the streets and wrote short sketches describing the oddities of the city. Failure after failure beat him down but at last he secured work on a newspaper. Then with a partner he opened a five cent eating house called, "The Hard Times," which would have proved a success had the partner not rung off with the money and the cook. Hearn was left with the debts.
At about this time, Hearn began his translation from modern French masters. He never made a mistake regarding literature. His first translation was Gauthier's One of Cleopatra's Nights, and at a later date, he translated Anatole France's The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard, and Flaubert's Temptation of St. Anthony. It was also during these days in New Orleans that he began contributing Oriental stories to the newspapers. These he collected and made into the first volume typical of his strange genius, and now famous under the title, Chinese Ghosts. "The volume, Chinese Ghosts," he oncc wrote, "is an attempt in the direction I hope to make triumph someday, poetical prose."
Each of the six legendary stories contained in this volume cost him months of study and painstaking work. His contribution to literature may be found in the simple flow and subtle sense of his words, chosen for their musical interplay of vowel sounds as well as for their power to express clearly the desired ideas. And more than this; he gives the reader a ghostly shudder by building up an intimacy with the unseen. He makes us feel the great unknown, as though the air in which we move were filled with weird, haunting spirits, companions somehow to those locked in our hearts.
It is true that he worked within the sad limits set for him by life, but within these boundaries he performed miracles. He made tragedy a thing of great beauty and pictured it without irony or bitterness. Passionate flights of suffering he recorded without cruelty and even death and hopelessness he clothed with a certain fragrance. His pen could hurt no living creature for it was directed always by an affection for nature and a love for the mystical.
From New Orleans he went to the West Indies where he wrote some travel sketches and finally, in the year 1890, he arrived in Japan. The call of the Orient that drive his mother to Asia Minor and sent his father to India brought Lafcadio Hearn to Japan. He was now forty years old and weary unto death of the industrial Anglo-Saxon civilization in which for the past twenty-five years, he confessed, he lived like a rat and "must have acquired something of that disposition." In Japan he found no difficulty in fitting himself modestly into the picture, and he at once began the process of suppressing and even stamping out the smoldering remains of his Occidental civilization.
He gave up his journalistic work and became a teacher of English in the schools. He married a Japanese wife who gave him several children and he enjoyed a home life of great sweetness and simplicity. Now his chilled nature began to thaw out and, to amuse the children, he translated the fairytales and other romances of Old Japan. Now there were times when he seemed to kneel at the feet of nature or sit in the lap of one of the giant bronze Buddhas and again he would stand in the spray like shade of tall bamboos and look up at the pattern against the glowing sun, all to see how it could best be told with a pen. At last he was happy!
For the sake of his children and because of his contempt for the Western world he renounced his citizenship and became a subject of Japan. He threw away Western science and, attracted by the poetry and glamor of Eastern religion, became a Buddhist. To the very end, civilization, of which he had been given a full bitter taste, remained to him a hideous thing. But the ghost of his life, the idea of universal evil, never left him.
He died in the fall of 1904 after having brought back to life many of the dead romances that had lain moldering in the ancient dust of old Japan. With his exquisite style he has given Eastern folklore its important place in our literature. He blew the breath of life into those weird spirits in whose realms he really lived and died.
Manuel Komroff
New York
March, 1927
from his introduction to Lafcadio Hearn Some Chinese Ghosts, Modern Library 1927.
During the colorful and splendid coronation of the Mikado held in Kyoto toward the end of the year 1915 a gold medal and ribbon known as the Sho-shii, which is the fourth class of the junior rank of court, was conferred on Lafcadio Hearn under his Japanese name Koizumi Yakumo. But this honor came too late. Lafcadio Hearn had already been dead for over ten years. And what honor could there be for a departed spirit who, even during his mortal life, dwelt in the weird ghostly realms of his imagination?
His strange name came from one of the Greek Ionian islands, Leucedia, which is pronounced Lafcadio. Here he was born in the year 1850, the son of an Irish surgeon serving in the English Army of Occupation and a Greek girl mother. Six years later the little family moved to Ireland, but here they were not very happy. The call of the East was too strong for them to resist. The little mother soon abandoned her husband and child, ran off to seek a warmer and happier clime, married again and ended up going to Asia Minor. The father also married again, turned Lafcadio over to the care of a great-aunt, and left for India. Many, many years later, Lafcadio Hearn himself abandoned western civilization and found a home in Japan.
His education was strictly religious. He was first sent to Jesuit school in the north of France and later to a Roman Catholic college in the north of England. Here he acquired his haunting horror of Gothic cathedrals and conventional beliefs. The idea that ghosts lurked in the dark corners of old churches took hold of him and was greater than his fear of Hell. He soon lost his religion. An accident caused him to lose his sight of one eye and this misfortune greatly influenced his entire life, for the eye that remained was very defective and near-sighted. The vivid world of reality faded before him, the pictures that make up life became dim, the sun became clouded over with a milky film, and he was ready for the life in the ghostly spheres of his own imagination -- the life that was later dedicated to a literature of rare magic beauty.
At sixteen or seventeen, we find him in London suffering from illness and extreme poverty. We find him sleeping in a hayloft for the sake of the heat rising from the well-fed horses in the stalls below.
At nineteen, he was penniless in New York serving as a waiter and sleeping in the parks, and at twenty, he had wandered out to Cincinnati and was working first as a messenger and then as a peddler of mirrors for a Syrian merchant. Mirrors for Cincinnati from a young, wall-eyed peddler who could himself reflect the strange, dark phosphorescent beauty of the Orient!
He had other jobs but lost them all. At every stroke he met defeat and soon he lost his courage and with that he became timid and afraid. He was afraid of the real world, which he could see but for dimly as though it were a haunting ghost. But at night, when all was still and peaceful and the inhabitants of the prosperous and enterprising city were snug in their beds, then he marched forth into the kingdom of this imagination, into the fairyland that he conjured up in his romantic brain . . . then he crawled, half-starved, into a rusty boiler, that lay among the rubbish of vacant lot, and went to sleep.
His first start in the field of letters came several years later when he secured work on a newspaper. His extreme shyness prevented him from doing general reporting; and, apropos of this, the editor of the paper once remarked that if Hearn was sent to interview anyone, the person would have to come out into the street and invite him into the house or he would come back to the office empty-handed. But he soon distinguished himself in the reporting of a horrible murder. The ghost and corpse set his imagination working, and from these companion spirits, he had nothing to fear. More work, allowing play for his marvelously vivid descriptive powers, followed and for a time he was almost comfortable, when suddenly he lost his job, and, owing to an illegal marriage contracted with a negress, had to leave Cincinnati.
New Orleans seemed warmer and in character closer to the Orient. Here he walked the streets and wrote short sketches describing the oddities of the city. Failure after failure beat him down but at last he secured work on a newspaper. Then with a partner he opened a five cent eating house called, "The Hard Times," which would have proved a success had the partner not rung off with the money and the cook. Hearn was left with the debts.
At about this time, Hearn began his translation from modern French masters. He never made a mistake regarding literature. His first translation was Gauthier's One of Cleopatra's Nights, and at a later date, he translated Anatole France's The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard, and Flaubert's Temptation of St. Anthony. It was also during these days in New Orleans that he began contributing Oriental stories to the newspapers. These he collected and made into the first volume typical of his strange genius, and now famous under the title, Chinese Ghosts. "The volume, Chinese Ghosts," he oncc wrote, "is an attempt in the direction I hope to make triumph someday, poetical prose."
Each of the six legendary stories contained in this volume cost him months of study and painstaking work. His contribution to literature may be found in the simple flow and subtle sense of his words, chosen for their musical interplay of vowel sounds as well as for their power to express clearly the desired ideas. And more than this; he gives the reader a ghostly shudder by building up an intimacy with the unseen. He makes us feel the great unknown, as though the air in which we move were filled with weird, haunting spirits, companions somehow to those locked in our hearts.
It is true that he worked within the sad limits set for him by life, but within these boundaries he performed miracles. He made tragedy a thing of great beauty and pictured it without irony or bitterness. Passionate flights of suffering he recorded without cruelty and even death and hopelessness he clothed with a certain fragrance. His pen could hurt no living creature for it was directed always by an affection for nature and a love for the mystical.
From New Orleans he went to the West Indies where he wrote some travel sketches and finally, in the year 1890, he arrived in Japan. The call of the Orient that drive his mother to Asia Minor and sent his father to India brought Lafcadio Hearn to Japan. He was now forty years old and weary unto death of the industrial Anglo-Saxon civilization in which for the past twenty-five years, he confessed, he lived like a rat and "must have acquired something of that disposition." In Japan he found no difficulty in fitting himself modestly into the picture, and he at once began the process of suppressing and even stamping out the smoldering remains of his Occidental civilization.
He gave up his journalistic work and became a teacher of English in the schools. He married a Japanese wife who gave him several children and he enjoyed a home life of great sweetness and simplicity. Now his chilled nature began to thaw out and, to amuse the children, he translated the fairytales and other romances of Old Japan. Now there were times when he seemed to kneel at the feet of nature or sit in the lap of one of the giant bronze Buddhas and again he would stand in the spray like shade of tall bamboos and look up at the pattern against the glowing sun, all to see how it could best be told with a pen. At last he was happy!
For the sake of his children and because of his contempt for the Western world he renounced his citizenship and became a subject of Japan. He threw away Western science and, attracted by the poetry and glamor of Eastern religion, became a Buddhist. To the very end, civilization, of which he had been given a full bitter taste, remained to him a hideous thing. But the ghost of his life, the idea of universal evil, never left him.
He died in the fall of 1904 after having brought back to life many of the dead romances that had lain moldering in the ancient dust of old Japan. With his exquisite style he has given Eastern folklore its important place in our literature. He blew the breath of life into those weird spirits in whose realms he really lived and died.
Manuel Komroff
New York
March, 1927
from his introduction to Lafcadio Hearn Some Chinese Ghosts, Modern Library 1927.
Thursday, July 7, 2011
EARTH ~
it used to be so easy
gallopingdog.com
all of these drawings were made in response to titles contributed to the artist
sam brown
at his website explodingdog by viewers here there and everywhere.
i've never been to his website. i'm old fashioned. i read his books.
sam brown
at his website explodingdog by viewers here there and everywhere.
i've never been to his website. i'm old fashioned. i read his books.
where does it all go?
mom says i'm special
this seems to be quite interesting
it used to be so easy
i am building a better world for you
she is my sunshine
gallopingdog.com
Wednesday, July 6, 2011
NEW FROM LONGHOUSE ~
FROM THE TOP OF THE WORLD
for Lynn Nankivil
At the horizon, I sit at the center of the Universe
observing all living creatures,
inhaling, exhaling the universal soul;
I discern each individual fate carefully:
Alexander the Great, President Abraham Lincoln, Czar Nicolas,
Mahatma Gandhi, Indira Gandhi, people
who sailed on the Titanic, people who flew
on Pan Am flight 103 and others,
and Buddhist monks in the cursed nation of Cambodia,
and hovering in front of me--- the Kennedys---
what rose up from John-John’s karma? Or maybe JFK
wanted his son to join him
in the Nagaraja realm
and not ascend to the Devaraja?
All these beings, their appointments
set so bizarrely--- violent death.
When the body is dead
Ignorance or Knowledge adheres to the soul
and it comes back again and again….
I gleefully contemplate Knowledge;
but Ignorance frightens the wits out of me.
Greed! Anger! Hatred! Are roots of Ignorance!
Wisdom! Love! Compassion! Are fruits of Knowledge!
I pray that Wisdom, Love, and Compassion should prevail.
Looking at the sky, I see Walt Whitman;
when I look at the trees, Walt Whitman peers out at me;
when I look at the grass, he beckons me;
and when I close my eyes,
Brother Walt is beyond the earth waiting for me and you.
FROM THE TOP OF THE WORLD
for Lynn Nankivil
At the horizon, I sit at the center of the Universe
observing all living creatures,
inhaling, exhaling the universal soul;
I discern each individual fate carefully:
Alexander the Great, President Abraham Lincoln, Czar Nicolas,
Mahatma Gandhi, Indira Gandhi, people
who sailed on the Titanic, people who flew
on Pan Am flight 103 and others,
and Buddhist monks in the cursed nation of Cambodia,
and hovering in front of me--- the Kennedys---
what rose up from John-John’s karma? Or maybe JFK
wanted his son to join him
in the Nagaraja realm
and not ascend to the Devaraja?
All these beings, their appointments
set so bizarrely--- violent death.
When the body is dead
Ignorance or Knowledge adheres to the soul
and it comes back again and again….
I gleefully contemplate Knowledge;
but Ignorance frightens the wits out of me.
Greed! Anger! Hatred! Are roots of Ignorance!
Wisdom! Love! Compassion! Are fruits of Knowledge!
I pray that Wisdom, Love, and Compassion should prevail.
Looking at the sky, I see Walt Whitman;
when I look at the trees, Walt Whitman peers out at me;
when I look at the grass, he beckons me;
and when I close my eyes,
Brother Walt is beyond the earth waiting for me and you.
Please inquire about purchasing with a credit card. You may order by check (total $9.95) made payable to "Longhouse" & send to
Longhouse, Publishers & Booksellers, PO Box 2454, West Brattleboro, Vermont 05303. Thank you!
Or, Order now with easy-to-use Paypal ($8.95 + $1 s/h - US addresses only). Thanks!
Longhouse, Publishers & Booksellers, PO Box 2454, West Brattleboro, Vermont 05303. Thank you!
Or, Order now with easy-to-use Paypal ($8.95 + $1 s/h - US addresses only). Thanks!
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
NEW FROM LONGHOUSE ~
holding my breath—
a drive to deep right field
and the rising moon
Please inquire about purchasing with a credit card. You may order by check (total $9.95) made payable to "Longhouse" & send to
Longhouse, Publishers & Booksellers, PO Box 2454, West Brattleboro, Vermont 05303. Thank you!
Or, Order now with easy-to-use Paypal ($8.95 + $1 s/h - US addresses only). Thanks!
holding my breath—
a drive to deep right field
and the rising moon
Please inquire about purchasing with a credit card. You may order by check (total $9.95) made payable to "Longhouse" & send to
Longhouse, Publishers & Booksellers, PO Box 2454, West Brattleboro, Vermont 05303. Thank you!
Or, Order now with easy-to-use Paypal ($8.95 + $1 s/h - US addresses only). Thanks!
Monday, July 4, 2011
EARTH ~
Eilen Jewell Band
We've been visiting Grafton, Vermont for many decades now, always as a side-trip passing through and never for the 4th of July fireworks and Vermont Symphony Orchestra extravaganza which we can't afford the tickets to anyway. I know there are other Vermonters like us.
The village of Grafton has a population of less than 700 — easily half the size of its Civil War era.
The town was named after Grafton, MA., supposedly during a bidding & drinking episode — so connect the dots. Lots of American history was made this way.
The town was first founded as "Thomlinson".
The Old Tavern inn was established when Thomas Jefferson was newly President and has stayed afloat continuously ever since, a feat with few rivals in this country. The folks we visited with on the hotel's broad front porch seemed extra comfy and happy with their stay.
In the 1960s the Windham Foundation restored the village, making it almost impossible for any hardscrabble Vermonter to own much of anything in the village, but it also spiffed up buildings and decorated the spot as an authentic New England town with much success. Greg Joly and I did a poetry reading to raise money for flood victims of Hurricane Katrina on the town library porch without ever being invited and no one chased us off. In fact few were there. Likewise, when Sweetheart and I visited recently and had a little impromptu picnic by a village brook, boots off, books with us, lunchpail, no one said "No". We arrived at 9AM and would stay for Eilen Jewell's Band who were to perform at 5 that afternoon right behind the Old Tavern.
Since we were there for the day we roamed all the village on-foot. To the school playground and the swings, then down to the working forge — a fire pit and blacksmith hammering away inside the darkness. After that it was a stroll over to the minerals museum with a fellow running the one room quite friendly and quite batty about all things rock: from Zaire to local Vermont-bred gems. We took a run through the Grafton Cheese station, neighboring deli, out to a well used baseball diamond and scrubby bleachers, small garden pockets, through backlots of barn and homes, taking photographs, the one country store not exactly decked out for tourists and more homespun (we like it always), finally back to the library, and with a mental note we would delve into the town historical museum after our little picnic and deep reading.
The tools are a hallmark in the historical museum, as is the back history of soapstone manufacturing and sheep raising from the region. There is a legacy of African-American families in the town, maybe the most notable is the native storyteller Daisy Turner, who died in 1988 in Grafton at age 104. In Ken Burns film The Civil War, one can watch Daisy Turner reciting Civil War poetry on her dying year. She was one of a kind.
By 4 in the afternoon we got ourselves to the Eilen Jewell Band. A free concert, which is absolutely giving of the town. A small short step-up stage with canopy was placed in the parking lot and folks just gathered round — under the huge maple trees, on the lawn, walking past; you'll even see a kid on a bicycle caught in my film pumping around the parking lot in his own time with the music. The little film was shot hand-held right on the spur. This is a performer and band working in the great tradition of the self-employed — they tune their own instruments and put up the whole show and take it all down, travel to the next town — which will be on Thursday in Burlington, Vermont as the opening act for Wanda Jackson.
film © bob arnold
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