poem and some annoyances

Time rolls his ceaseless course. The race of yore,
Who danced our infancy upon their knee,
And told our marvelling boyhood legends store
Of their strange ventures happed by land or sea,
How are they blotted from the things that be!
How few, all weak and withered of their force,
Wait on the verge of dark eternity,
Like stranded wrecks, the tide returning hoarse,
To sweep them from our sight. time rolls his ceaseless course.
-sir walter scott


I've been appalled by the buffoons we have running this
country. What happened to the idea that this country meant something,
and the the people governing this country should govern rather than
spend all their time on demogoguery and partisanship and bloviation?
What happened to getting stuff done?

drawing of person 

I dwell in possibility

I dwell in possibility-
A fairer House than Prose-
More numerous of Windows-
Superior-for Doors-

Of Chambers as the Cedars-
Impregnable of Eye-
And for an Everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky-

Of Visitors-the fairest-
For Occupation-This-
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To Gather Paradise-

-Emily Dickinson

It's kind of a nice day out, all the dandelions out looking up at the sky, and the interzone was crowded, so i came back home to play a little music on the guitar, and here I am, typing away on the blog, not really having much to say. but in general, feel that this is the nicest time of year, with the winds going through the trees and the world being pretty quiet and all of that, and yet, it is always difficult to keep on track and do the things that need to be done. Still, there are the things that need to be done, and the things that need to make sense although maybe they don't and the things that involve toast and the buttering of toast, and then there's biscuits and gravy and other things like that.

Zarathustra 4

Zarathustra, however, beheld the people andwas amazed. then he spoke thus:
"Man is a rope, tied beweeen beast and overman-a rope over an abyss. A dangerous across, a dangerous on-the-way, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous shuddering and stopping.
"What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end: what can be loved in man is that he is an overture and a going under.
"I lover those who do not know how to live, except by going under, for they are those who cross over.
"I love those who do not first seek behind the stars for a reason to go under and be a sacrifice, but who sacrifice themselves for the earth, that the earth may some day become the overman's.
"I love him who works and invents to build a house for the overman and to prepare earth, animal, and plant for him: for thus he wants to go under.
"I love him who loves his virtue, for virtue is the will to go under and an arrow of longing.
"I love him who does not hold back one drop of spirit for himself, but wants to be entirely the spirit of his virtue: thus he strides over the bridge as spirit.
"I love him who does not hold back one drop of spirit for himself, but wants to be entirely the spirit of his virtue: thus he strides over the bridge as spirit.
"I love him who makes his virtue his addiction and his catastrophe: for his virtue's sake he wants to live on and to live no longer.
"I love him who does not want to have too many virtues. One virtue is more virtue than two, because it is more of a noose on which his catastrophe may hang.
-from Thus Spake Zarathustra

this book is full of powerful imagery, but even I admit that it doesn't make much sense, but still, it says many things.


Five years have past; five summers; with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a soft inland murmur.-Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
That on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky.
The day is come when I again repose
Here, under this dark sycamore, and view
These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts,
Which at this season, with their unripe fruits,
Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves
'Mid groves and copses. Once again I see
These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines
Of sportive wood run wild: these pastoral farms,
Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke
Sent up, in silence, from among the trees!
With some uncertain notice, as might seem
Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods
Or of some Hermit's cave, where by his fire
The Hermit sits alone
-wordsworth "lines composed above tintern abbey"

typing

one often wonders, as he is typing along, if he is writing anything useful. Well, I spent a lot of 1995 writing all the tiniest details of my quite boring life down,and when i reread them I do get an impression that there was something there, and despite the fact that my life was spent drawing pictures of coffee cups and feeling morose that girls wouldn't go out with me and just kind of sitting and contemplating my own thought processes, still there is something there, and something in just the fabric of reality as I saw it that did have some meaning and some tangible value, but according to what scale? you might ask, but anyway, that's all a matter of speculation. I am reminded of that poem by wordsworth: "dear william, why do you sit on that stone all day? Well, (he answers) must we be always seeking, or does nothing come of itself?" In other words, maybe if I just sit here and contemplate the grass and the poke-weed, and the quahaug in its shell, something might come to mind, or the mica on the side of the rock, or any of that stuff. Like just today I took a nice leisurely walk from near Buchanan over to the campus area, and the dandelions and the grass and the other plants were all growing away, the air was nice and calm, and there was a sense of peace, that the hurry of life is really not a necessary condition, and so i walked down the hill and back up again to the library, and saw a flock of geese up in the sky, forming a "v' shape, and students milling around and doing whatever it is that students usually do.
What's the deal with D.H. Lawrence? Why did Merton rail against him so much in his autobiography? Lawrence has written some great poems. Maybe he was too much of a "sensualist" or something.
I'm going to post some of my off-the-wall guitar playing soon, so stay tuned. The stuff I have on the web now is just me playing covers, which I also think are good, but I did develop a number of original sounds and techniques early in my guitar career, and I'd like to have a few examples of these recorded. When I first started playing guitar, I seldom did songs, but just messed with stuff: first of all strumming patterns combined with muting of bar chords, and then other single-string playing methods which are kind of hard to describe.

159

They dropped like Flakes-
They dropped like Stars-
Like Petals from a Rose-
When suddenly across the June
A wind with fingers-goes-

They perished in the Seamless Grass-
No eye could find the place-
But God can summon every face
On his Repealless-List.
-dickinson

the fact of the matter is that i haven't been feeling all that creative, although it seems there might be something out there worth writing about. it would be good to be more drawn to sitting down and scribbling in the commercial way that bukowski ended up being, but that's not what it's about, it is more about doing the sort of work that really has meaning, wandering to and fro and writing long letters to old friends on the computer. I've been reading "some prefer nettles" in Japanese, and don't understand quite a bit of it, but do understand enough of it to keep going, I guess. i may not precisely know what a word means, but i can often guess and be right based on the context or maybe something about the character.
The cherry blossoms are in bloom in Japan, which is a major big deal. their big thing is to go out and get very drunk sitting under the sakura and all of that, and the whole blooming and then fading away thing is a big part of the japanese aesthetic and buddhist ideas of transience which are such a big deal in the poetry and consciousness of that particular scenario. That reminds me of brother lawrence, who when viewing the branches of a tree was struck by the fact that it would bloom again the next year, and in that moment was gripped by an earthshaking awareness of the power of the world which never left him, although that has not much to do with sakura, although they are both involving trees that bloom, which I guess would be the connection.
I've been thinking of getting back to pine, my old email program from the old days. apparently it is still being developed, and I liked something about its simplicity. Then again, do I really want to mess with the world in a way that will just frustrate me and make me want to be irritated and demoralized? Absolutely not.

I was in a room on the second floor across from a bar. The bar was called the Gangplank Cafe. From my room I could see through the open bar doors and into the bar. There were some rough faces in that bar, some interesting faces. I stayed in my room at night and drank wine and looked at the faces in the bar while my money ran out. In the daytime I took long slow walks. I sat for hours taring at pigeons. I only ate one meal a day so my money would last longer. I found a dirty cafe with a dirty propietor, but you got a big breakfact, hotcakes, grits, sausage, for very little.

-from Factotum, by Charles Bukowski


I'm glad I've gives up drinking, but there are a lot of interesting faces around, not only in bars.