Returning to Earth — Jim Harrison
My, how fate loves to jest,..
How can people continue to love someone who makes them so unhappy?
I am obsessed with how fragile art, literature, love, and music, even the natural world are in the presence of severe illness and inevitable death.
Now in the motel it occurred to me that our passions are so messy that we don’t even need a villain to fuck up our lives.
Far Beyond the Field
Haiku by Japanese Women — Makoto Ueda
spring rain —
all things on earth
becoming beautiful — Chiyojo
blissfully lying
under the falling blossoms
a skeleton — Enomoto Seifu
some blossoms there are
that nobody sees —
an oak deep in the woods — Shira Sonome
winter has begun —
trees alive and dead
indistinguishable — Mitsuhashi Takajo
losing my way
is part of the journey —
poppy flowers — Inahata Teiko
falling
like broken promises
spring snow — Katayama Yumiko
choosing a swimsuit —
when did his eyes
replace mine? — Mayuzumi Madoka
a shooting star —
in love with someone, not knowing
where it will lead me — Mayuzumi Madoka
Born A Crime — Trevor Noah
It’s a powerful experience, shitting. There’s something magical about it, profound even.
“Why do all this? Why show him the world when he’s never going to leave the ghetto?”
“Because, ‘ she would say, “even if he never leaves the ghetto, he will know that the ghetto is not the world. If that is all I accomplish, I’ve done enough.”
Because racism exists, and you have to pick a side. You can say that you don’t pick sides, but eventually life will force you to pick a side.
Far And Wide — Neil Peart
— It was up to the writer to make something beautiful or interesting.
When people you love want something very much, you have to try to help them get it.
Never judge anyone for something they can’t change.
— nor what is called the Dunning-Kruger Effect, which finds that some people are too stupid to know how stupid they are. If that isn’t scary, I don’t know what is.
Danube — Claudio Magris
(Las Castas) …but it ends up by involuntarily singing the praises of the capricious and rebellious game of love, the great wrecker of all closed social hierarchies, the scatterer, the shuffler of every perfectly ordered pack of cards, that muddles up the diamonds with clubs or spades so as to make the game enjoyable, or even playable.
In any case, it is Heidegger himself who successfully contradicts the cult of putting down roots. In his greatest work he has taught us that, “displacement is a fundamental way of being-in-the-world”, that without loss and disorientation, with wandering along paths that peter out in the woods, there is no call, there is no possibility of hearing the authentic word of Being.
Hōjōki — Kamo No Chōmei
Essays in Idleness — Yoshida Kenkō
Translated by Meredith McKinney
Yes, take it for all in all, this world is a hard place to live, and both we and our dwellings are fragile and impermanent, as these events reveal. And besides, there are the countless occasions when situations or circumstance cause us anguish. — Chōmei
What kind of man will feel depressed at being idle? There is nothing finer than to be alone with nothing to distract you. — Kenkō
So many strive in hopes of the future, even as the life still in them is daily dissolving away like snow from beneath the snowman. — Kenkō
Cronies
A Burlesque
Adventures with Ken Kesey, Neal Cassidy, The Merry Pranksters,
And The Grateful Dead — Ken Babbs
DON’T BREAK THE COOL.
The purpose of fiction is to help us answer the question we must constantly be asking ourselves: Who do we think we are and what do we think we’re doing? — Robert Stone
Wake up, wake up, there’s a a new world a-rising and it’s gonna reshuffle the deck.
This is the fear thing, you know. It doesn’t matter how much security and credit and community goodwill and social prestige that you build up, there always exists in the framework of our rules in society the fact that all you have to do is push the right button and it’s blown. That’s our great talent. We’re unerring in searching out those buttons — Kesey
The Life and Zen Haiku Poetry of Santoka Taneda — Sumita Oyama
Translated by William Scott Wilson
As for one’s fate, no matter what fate, no matter who, no matter where, no matter when, work it out for yourself.
How lonely
the road
so straight ahead.
A cold autumn drizzle:
somehow not dying,
I carry on.
Earthly passions are themselves enlightenment.
Late autumn rain;
at someone’s kindness
my eyes brim with tears.
Was It Worth It? — Doug Peacock
Solitude in wilderness is the easiest escape from the prison of culture and self-importance.
Homo sapiens, meanwhile, evolved to deal with saber-toothed cats in the bush, bears of the night, or, especially, other humans. But a new danger has arrived, a relatively fresh enemy: The beast of today is climate change. How do we respond to a dimly perceived but deadly worldwide threat that will require a collective human resolve to mitigate? Did evolution not provide us with the wit to face the rising oceans, the melting ice, the warming Earth, and raging fires that will precariously shrink the habitats seven and a half billion people depend on? For us, ecological naïvetè is not a survivable choice.
That which evolves does not persist without the conditions of its genesis.
Complete Poems — Jim Harrison
Cardinal
That great tree covered with snow
until its branches droop,
the oak, that keeps its leaves through winter
(in spring a bud breaks the stem),
has in its utmost branch
a cardinal,
who brushing snow aside, pauses for an instant
then plummets toward earth
until just above a drift he opens his wings
and breaks, fluttering
in a cloud of snow he pushed aside.
******
I want an obscene epitaph, one that will disgust the Memorial
Day crowds so that they’ll indignantly topple my grave stone.
*****
The escaping turkey vulture vomits up his load of rotten
fawn for quick flight. The lesson is obvious & literary.
****
But
as poets we would prefer to have a star fall on us (that meteor
got me in the gizzard!), or lightning strike us and not while we’re
playing golf but perhaps in a wheat field while we’re making
love in a thunderstorm, or a tornado take us away outside of
Mingo, Kansas, like Judy Garland unfortunately. Or a rainbow
suffocate us.
****
Selecting the finest belly you write your name with a long thin
line of cocaine but she is perspiring and you can’t properly snort
it off. Disappointments.
******
Everything we eat is dead except an occasional oyster or clam.
Oriental Mythology
The Masks of God, Volume 2 — Joseph Campbell
We have just read that when the Buddha extinguished ego in himself, the world burst into flower. But that, exactly, is the way it has always appeared to those in whom wonder — and not salvation—is religion.
There never was a time when time was not, nor will there come a time when time will cease to be: this sorrowful world—as it is—will go on, sorrowful, forever. Moreover, the sorrow that meets the eye does not represent, by any means, the magnitude in depth as well as breadth of the whole. The misery of man and the beasts around him, the plant world and supporting earth, the rocks and waters, fire, wind, and flying clouds, indeed space itself with its luminaries, constitutes but the least fraction of that ever-living, ever-deluded body and conglomerate of misery which is the universe in its total being.
Chances Are… — Richard Russo
Because yank out one thread from the fabric of human destiny, and everything unravels though it could also be said that things have a tendency to unravel regardless.
What you can’t afford to lose is precisely what the world robs you of. How it knew what you needed the most, just so it could deny you that very thing. Was a question for philosophers.
The deeper and longer something remained buried, the more power it had when it finally rose to the surface.
Maybe this was the unstated purpose of education, to get young people to see the world through the tired eyes of age: disappointment and exhaustion and defeat masquerading as wisdom.
It wasn’t in fact possible to strip life of its clutter for the simple reason that life was clutter.
Spit In The Ocean #7
All About Kesey — Edited by Ed McClanahan
A few years ago, in a question-and-answer session someone asked him, rather disdainfully, whether he “really believed” that acid offered the only path to enlightenment.
“Oh no,” he answered, “grief will do it for you. But if I had a choice, I’d take acid every time.”
Ed McClanahan
Ken Kesey was the heart and soul of everything that he was ever involved in. He was always the point man in every group dynamic. He mad everything he ever touched special.
It made no difference to him what the project, event, or experiment was, Ken only knew life, happiness, joy, and standing on the edge. Bill Walton
When it comes to realign going toward the light, the people in this room are about as enlightened as it gets. I know Baba Ram Das, I know Tim Leary, I know all the honchos of enlightenment. There isn’t a one of them that knows anything that everybody in this room doesn’t know. It’s time we fought for it. It’s time we fought when we say, Moby Dick is better than The Carpetbaggers. Okay? Moby Dick is better than The Carpetbaggers. The Taj Mahal is better than the Holiday Inn. The Eugene Armory is better than the Federal Building. Kesey
You know Ken had a little joke, a little jingle on himself. He said, “Of offering more than what I can deliver, I have a bad habit, it’s true. / But I have to offer more than what I can deliver, to be able to deliver what I do.” Maybe that is true of everybody. Robert Stone
Some folk come
to stir it up
and when it’s stirred
they split—simple as that Robert Hunter
Diary of the One-Grass Hut — Santoka Taneda
A life of reflection without shame, an obliging life without being disgraced before Heaven and Earth, a life that leads no seeds of future trouble—such a life would be truly spiritually peaceful and quiet.
I do not believe in the world to come.
I believe in the universal spirit, but deny the individual soul.
Sake is my koan. Solving the riddle of sake—being able to truly taste sake will be my final certificate of enlightenment, my attainment of satori.
The Poet — Ralph Waldo Emerson
So the poet’s habit of living should be set on a key so low that the common influences should delight him.
Language is fossil poetry.
Trajectory — Richard Russo
The way Ray saw it, human nature was flawed, almost by definition, pretty much a hundred percent of the time, which left a sizable margin for error.
Because this brutal world simply will not spare you—even when you’re young—knowledge of the worm in the apple.
The History Of Now — Daniel Klein
Figure out what holds this ridiculous town together and we’ll find out what keeps our souls from shattering like shot glasses thrown against the Railroad Car’s wall on a Saturday night.
Why in heaven’s name does one need to dramatize life? Isn’t life ridiculous enough just as it is?
What Werner grasped is that every person, no matter how wounded, is the final arbiter of the meaning of everything in her own life.
The world is a den of thieves and night is falling. Evil breaks it’s chains and runs through the world like a mad dog. The poison affects us all. No one escapes. Therefore let us be happy while we are happy. Let us be kind, generous, affectionate and good. It is necessary and not at all shameful to take pleasure in the little world.
How Music Works — David Byrne
Similarly, I can be moved to tears by a truly awful recording or a bad copy of a good recording. Would I be moved even more if the quality were higher? I doubt it.
There is really no hierarchy in music — good musicians of any give style are no better or worse than good musicians of another.
No matter what format music is delivered in, the experience we treasure, the thing we value, is still ephemeral and intangible.
Fare Thee Well — Joel Selvin with Pamela Turley
In fact, it was the Deadheads who willed this concert into existence. Their collective, conscious expectation of a giant celebration in honor of the fiftieth anniversary created the event.
Between the the power of the Deadheads and the allure of the music, the band encountered a complex siren song that even the most recalcitrant among them could not resist.
… ten sets, eighty-eight songs…
The grand ambition it required is something that goes to the heart of the Grateful Dead — the band that went to Egypt to play the Great Pyramids, the band that built the Wall of Sound, the band whose manager once posted plans for a flying amphitheater on his office wall. Any other rock band would have simply put together one set of greatest hits and played it five times. But the Grateful Dead were always more than just another rock band..
Czesław Miłosz
A California Life — Cynthia L. Haven
But Einstein was also an exile, and he spoke to Miłosz as an exile: “You had better stick to your country,” he told the Polish poet. Einstein counseled him to be patient. Miłosz was dismayed and disillusioned. “So I walked out of the little house on Mercer Street and my car door banged shut, and I drove past the milage signs numbly, a stranger to my own body. All of us yearn naïvely for a certain point on the earth where the highest wisdom accessible to humanity at a given moment dwells, and it is hard to admit that such a point does not exist, that we have to rely only upon ourselves.”
He said, ‘Oh, well, nature to me, of course, is pure horror.’ And I said, ‘you were just talking about going up to the wine country country and how spectacular the hills were, and the color of the vines.’ And he said, ‘Oh, beauty—different story.’ Robert Hass
Rapture and Melancholy
The Diaries of Edna St. Vincent Millay — Edited by Daniel Mark Epstein
It seems to me I shall never go out on a misty night, drizzly night without feeling an emptiness beside me, without missing something—sorrowfully and, in an uncountable way, resentfully. It is too lonesome almost to be borne. And yet I don’t want anyone to come with me; I should be hateful, I know, to anyone who persisted in coming. To be lonesome is awful, but if I can’t be happy I want to be lonesome.
I began to wonder if the world wasn’t just going by its own momentum, and as for the other, well—I just couldn’t conceive of a soul living forever.
They make me hate the Creator; never you, for I could never hate a human being; if I should ever hate, really hate, it would be God.
Collected Poems — Edna St. Vincent Millay
What is the need of Heaven
When earth can be so sweet?
Time does not bring relief; you all have lied
Who told me time would ease me of my pain!
Ebb
I know what my heart is like
Since your love died:
It’s like a hollow ledge
Holding a little pool
Left there by the tide,
A little tepid pool,
Drying inward from the edge.
Pity me that the heart is slow to learn
What the swift mind beholds at every turn.
Until I Find You — John Irving
In this way, in increments both measurable and not, our childhood is stolen from us—not always in one momentous event but often in a series of small robberies, which add up to the same loss.
“Life forces enough final decisions on us.” Mrs. Oastler continued. “We should have the sense to avoid as many of the unnecessary ones as we can.”
“Forget the dead you’ve left, they will not follow you,” Bob sang—as always, with the utmost authority. Bob got a lot right, but he was wrong about that. As Jack would discover, everything followed you.
Milosz’s ABC’s — Czeslaw Milosz
We construct our private mythologies throughout our lives and those from the earliest years last the longest.
The differences that divide us—sex, race, skin color, customs, beliefs, ideas—pale in comparison with the fact that we are all woven out of time, that we are born and we die, mayflies who live but a day.
The Unwritten Book — Samantha Hunt
In reality, most of our lives are spent shrinking, eroding into bits and decaying. What if we celebrated that decay and championed the infinitesimal? I look for the bright colors and beauty of rot. Etymologically, there’s decadence in decay. Non-etymologically too.
I sometimes need the burn of alcohol to cut through the noise in my blood.
The soil of our land bears the stain of our violent history of fear and control. Dr. Adrienne Keene writes, “The system in what is currently known as the US isn’t ‘broken.’ It was designed by male white supremacist slaveowners on stolen indigenous land to protect their interests. It’s working as it was designed.”
In The Spirit Of Crazy Horse — Peter Mathiessen
We were left with what white society thought was worthless land…
Today, what was once called worthless land suddenly becomes valuable as the technology of white society advances. White society would now like to push us off off our reservations because beneath the barren land lie valuable mineral and oil resources. It is not a new development for white society to steal from nonwhite peoples. When white society succeeds it’s called colonialism. When white society’s efforts to colonize people are met with resistance it’s called war. But when the colonized Indians of North America meet to stand and resist we are called criminals. What could be more clear than that to treat us as criminals is a farce? We are an Indian nation and the governments of Canada and the United States and the dominate white society they represent have made war against our people, culture, spiritual ways and scared Mother Earth for over 400 years.
Leonard Peltier
The grazing animals, the hawks, the yellow coneflowers and sweet clover, the sego Lillies, bellflowers, and wild rose, made one wonder how this country must have looked in the lost days when the first Lakota came to it across the plains.
Because a tension that had been gathering on Pine Ridge for almost a century burst like the lightning in the huge black skies of the summer thunderstorm the night before, and three men died.
Travels With A Writing Brush
Classical Japanese Travel Writing
From The Manyōshū To Bashō — Translated by Meredith McKinney
Far from home
and haunted by longing
did I not hear
the cries of the cranes
I might die of sorrow
To what shall I compare
this world?
It is like a boat at daybreak
rowing away and gone
leaving no trace — Manyōshū
429
Things to make the heart
forlorn —
night roads, boat trips
skies of travel
lodgings on a journey
a voice chanting sutras
deep in a dark forest
in some mountain temple
and two lovers forced apart
before love is spent. — Dust Dancing on the Rafters — Goshirakawa
How might I too
flow clear as Yasu’s waters
though I pass my life
sullied by suffering
in this mortal world? — anonymous
This river’s swift
torrential surge
bears no comparison
with the fickle turbulence
of the human heart — anonymous
The Snow Leopard — Peter Mathiessen
Why is death so much on my mind when I do not feel I am afraid of it?—the dying, yes, especially in cold (hence the oppression brought by this north wind down off the glaciers, and the cold chop on the cold lake), but not the state itself. And yet I cling—to what? What am I to make of these waves of timidity, this hope of continuity, when at other moments I feel free as the bharal on those hights, ready for wolf and snow leopard alike?
Enough! I am not far enough along the path to perceive the Absolute in my own dung—yours, maybe, but not mine. Shit is shit, as Zen would say, or rather, Shit! I boot this trace of my swift passage through the world out of the yard.
The Rings of Saturn — W.G. Sebald
The iniquity of oblivion blindly scatters her poppyseed and when wretchedness falls upon us one summer’s day like snow, all we wish for is to be forgotten.
For days and weeks on end one racks one’s brains to no avail, and, if asked, one could not say whether one goes on writing purely out of habit, or craving for admiration, or because one knows not how to do anything other, or out of sheer wonderment, despair or outrage, any more than one could say whether writing renders one more perceptive or more insane.
The California Days of Ralph Waldo Emerson — Brian C. Wilson
“‘But Mr. Forbes!’ Mr. Emerson remonstrated, with humorous emphasis, thrusting the knife under a piece of the pie, and putting the entire weight of his character into his manner,—‘But Mr. Forbes, what is pie for?’”
Putting a metaphysical spin on it, Thayer attributed Emerson’s behavior to the fact that he “really believed in an immortal life, and had adjusted his conduct accordingly, so that, beautiful and grand as the natural objects were, among which our journey lay, they were matched by the sweet elevation of character and the spiritual charm of our gracious friend.”
The Great Leader — Jim Harrison
There was a specific cruelty to unattainable beauty that he felt now in his spine.
Can the brain be swollen with loneliness?
He wondered at how the totally sober mind’s tongue reached the rawest spots.
Travels in the Greater Yellowstone — Jack Turner
Interesting word “wonder.” From Old English wundrain: “to be affected with astonishment.”
Finally it offers this: “Far superior to anything formerly recognized or foreseen.”
Like all freedom, it’s a bit spooky.
No doubt most people would find this a desolate scene, appealing only to addicts of the sublime.
There Are Places In The World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness - Carlo Rovelli
Whoever boasts of being certain is usually the least reliable.
But this doesn’t mean either that we are completely in the dark. Between certainty and complete uncertainty there is a precious intermediate space—and it is in this intermediate space that our lives and our thoughts unfold.
The culture of today that keeps science and poetry so far apart is essentially foolish, to my way of thinking, because it makes us less able to see the complexity and the beauty of the world as revealed by both.
Just as understanding where rain comes from or what causes lightning prompted faith in the existence of Zeus to evaporate, so too the understanding of how life evolved and diversified on Earth has vastly multiplied the number of atheists in the world.
The Big Seven — Jim Harrison
The mystery was in the passion that suddenly overcomes one.
Sunderson decided he himself had behaved rather well though he wasn’t setting the bar very high and it was obvious that the seeds of his destruction were in alcohol and lechery.
Everything seems to be a sliding scale.
The world, of course, was full of needless details.
If you push a fantasy too hard it will self-destruct of its own weight.
He couldn’t imagine anything harder to do than fail to write.
The Case of the Howling Buddhas — Jim Harrison
In Blake’s terms what are the actual limits of desire?
A cautionary note flickered in his brain but failed to shine brightly.
Season Of The Witch — David Talbot
Onstage, Allen Ginsberg—wearing white Indian pyjamas and garlands of beads and flowers—looked out over the vast human dynamo that he had helped ignite and turned to his friend, Lawrence Ferlinghetti: “What if we’re wrong?”
Life is what it is. And yet there are moments when a team seems to come to the salvation of its wounded fans. When their victories seem our victories. Victories that we can savor for a lifetime, whenever we need to be reminded that life is not just a losing battle against disappointment and defeat.
The Last Beautiful Days of Autumn — John Nichols
Constantly I find myself in a panic because I am bombarded by visitors. I don’t know how to deflect them or send them packing. I am terrified of saying no, of being thought a son of a bitch.
I don’t think anybody can manipulate me anymore by threatening to remove themselves of their favors from my life. I love being without them just as much as I love being with them.
What a sweet unnerving anguish! I know it had to do with mortality and gratitude, the tragedy of our lives, and the joy of being here.
When I am happiest, the tragedy of human existence flairs up in me like a radiant and beautiful cancer.
I am haunted by dreams of utterly peaceful bones.
the little book of humanism — Andrew Copson and Alice Roberts
The principle of freedom of thought and expression should be extended to children too. No one - no matter how young - should ever be forced into following a religion or other tradition.
People sometimes say to me, ‘Why don’t you admit that the hummingbird, the butterfly, the Bird of Paradise are proof of the wonderful things produced by Creation?’ And I always say, well when you say that, you’ve also got to think of a little boy sitting on a river bank, like here in West Africa, that’s got a little worm, a living organism, in his eye and boring through the eyeball and is slowly turning him blind. The Creator God that you believe in, presumably, also made that little worm. —— David Attenborough
We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with sleep. — Shakespeare
I Got Mine — John Nichols
No matter what, I would write what I wanted to write, even if I starved to death.
It’s scary, but also somehow wonderful, to be a junkie for the euphoric turbulence of that emotional chaos.
But after you justify your initial sellout, the rest is easy.
The Red Caddy — Charles Bowden
There is clutter to life that ideas can never tolerate or make go away. To unravel something, you have to have a thesis. But to understand the dead ends, back alleys, and side roads of life itself, you have to mistrust your thesis and constantly keep an eye on it lest it blind you to detail, contradiction, lust, love, and loneliness.
And he will most often act out the one thing you dream of but cannot do: live your life regardless of the opinions of others.
The Other Americans — Laila Lalami
But private memory was nothing but a struggle against erasure.
Memory is an unreliable visitor.
You don’t want to be living someone else dream, trust me.
The Woman at Otowi Crossing — Frank Waters
No such gap exists, of course. At every moment in our lives we are all that we have been and will be; a seed whose growth unfolds in a pattern predestined to it from germination. Our failure to perceive any continuity only betrays how shallowly we ever know anyone, especially ourselves.
There was a cruelty in her refutation of them she could not help for they appeared to her now as etiolated dream-projections in a world that was itself one great mirage; at best merely receptacles of fatuous thoughts and desires stuffed into them by newspapers and radios which they evacuated like undigested ejecta in superficial prattle and malicious gossip.
Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights — Salman Rushdie
It was the resilience in human beings that represented their best chance of survival, their ability to look the unimaginable, the unconscionable, the unprecedented in the eye.
Love is the spring after winter. It comes to heal life’s wounds, inflicted by the loving cold.
But on this we agree: that to tell a story about the past is to tell a story about the present.
This is the question we ask ourselves as we explore and narrate our history: how did we get here from there?
Proximity to calamity released the human capacity for love.
Imagine A City — Mark Vanhoenacker
A myth rooted in a particular arrangement of hills, lakes, and waters would emphasize Pittsfield’s impressive natural context; it would also remind us that all cities—so often built along rivers, or on natural harbors so faultless as to seem fated, or the intersections of roads or rails themselves steered by topography—are sculpted by nature before they are by people.
..that all that man has built here—and by extension, everywhere—is fragile and contingent, at least in comparison with the mountain and this ocean, and with the timescales on which their existence, rather than ours, is measured.
Poontoosuck: The haunt of winter deer.
The Masks of God
Occidental Mythology — Joseph Campbell
The world is full of origin myths, and all are factually false.
, whereas no modern thinker in his right mind would argue for the historicity of the fragments of myth brought together in the Odyssey, we have a modern literature of learning reaching from here to the moon and back, doing precisely that for those sewn together in these ancient tales of about the same date.
, as Freud has remarked, there is the further problem of why in the case of Greece what appeared was poetry, and of the Jews, religion.
, adopted from Seneca: The fates guide him who will, him who won’t they drag.
(if I may say so) madness—which consists precisely in mistaking a visionary image for a fact.
The chief lost art of antiquity might be said, therefore, to have been the art of living in realization of the sheer wonder of the world: passing readily back and forth between the plane of experience of its hard crust and the omnipresent depth of inexhaustible wonder within.
The Institute — Stephen King
Great events turn on small hinges.
: wish in one hand, shit in the other, see which one fills up first.
Luke guessed you could get used to anything. It was a horrible idea.
God and the Folly of Faith — Victor Stegner
If he sought good conversation, you would think God would prefer the company of Bertrand Russell to Pat Robinson.
Irrationality is in the eye of the beholder. A trillion-trillion natural universes seems far more rational to me than one supernatural God of limitless power for which there isn’t a shred of evidence. At least we can apply established physics and cosmology to speculate knowledgeably about a multiverse. We have nothing but ancient superstitions to provide a basis for speculation about God.
Religion blinds, deafens, and numbs us to the reality around us, and though this may temporarily sooth our anxieties, like drugs or alcohol, there is a painful price to be paid down the road for such cowardly denial and self-defeating ignorance.
Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World — Barry Lopez
I object to society’s complacency.
Nor can someone from a culture that condescends to nature easily escape the haunting thought that one’s life is meaningless.
Whatever our individual failings might be, many of us in the end, I think, wish only this, to make some simple contribution, a good one or an original one if that be our gift, to be recalled as having done something worthy and dignified with our time.
Some of the pathways of a debilitating sexual history are simply destined never to be mapped.
Languages of Truth — Salman Rushdie
“I believe it’s because of the way we use language that we have got ourselves into this terrible trap, where words like freedom, democracy, and Christian values are still used to justify barbaric and shameful acts.” Harold Pinter
Not to know the difference between a metaphor and a lie is one definition of insanity.
If individual freedom is what you’re interested in, then heterodoxy, the ability to reject received ideas and stand against the orthodoxies of your time, may help you find your way there.
The struggle to know how to act for the best is a struggle that never ceases.
(the hero must always be a wanderer)
But beauty is not sentimentality, nor is it glamour.
In Search for the Genuine — Jim Harrison
Despite vaunted associations, friendships, correspondences, and often begrudging sociability, writing is a solo flight that lasts a lifetime.
For enormous answers we have always turned to poetry, whether it is Isaiah, Sophocles, Tu Fu, Shakespeare, Neruda, or Ginsberg, though even in poetry the answers are grassy hills compared to the vast and gloomy Everest of the question.
Good writers seem to know that we are permanently inconsolable.
The actual muse is the least civil woman in the history of the earth. She prefers to sleep with you when you’re a river rather than a mud puddle.
—- only to say that a life spent watching lacks content.
But a few times a year it is good to rid yourself of your average baggage, partly to see if it was worth carrying at all.
Up From The Depths — Aaron Sachs
But loss and bitterness are constants in human experience; health and happiness are always partial and fleeting.
“For enough they know they are in peril, well enough they know the causes of that peril;—nevertheless, the sea is the sea, and these drowning men do drown.” Melville — Pierre
The psychological and the societal are always in dialectical relationship.
I Walk Between The Raindrops — T.C. Boyle
What I’m talking about is grace—or call it luck, if you want. Some people have it and others don’t, that’s just the way it is, a spin of the stochastic wheel.
It’s the platitudes that define us and maybe even save us in the end.
The Piazza Tales — Herman Melville
And beauty is like piety—you cannot run and read it; tranquillity and consistency, with, nowadays, an easy chair, are needed.
The End of Michelangelo — Dan Gerber
Crow
I adore the showy non-
chalance of the crow dropping
down to the sidewalk out
of the oak, simply
stepping off his high perch
into the empty air, as if
into a desired oblivion, a
fragment of night, falling
straight down, dead-still;
flaring his wings—almost
an afterthought—an
instant above the terminal
concrete, just now
remembering, again, to survive.
The Last Chairlift — John Irving
—kissing is a judgement call.
“There’s more than one way to love people, Kid.”
You learn a lot about point of view from writing, and from sexual desire.
“Melancholy is good for the soul,”
In a country of sexual intolerance, there’s more than one Moses around.
The Philosophy of Modern Song — Bob Dylan
Because, ultimately, money doesn’t matter. Nor do the things it can buy. Because no matter how many chairs you have, you only have one ass.
“Poison Love” is illicit love. Contrary to what most people think, when you pay money for sex, that’s about the cheapest price there is.
Desire fades but traffic goes on forever.
Breakfast Of Champions — Kurt Vonnegut
“We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane.” Kilgore Trout
Behind his mask was a young man in the terminal stages of nostalgia and lover’s nuts.
“Takes all kinds of people to make up a world,” said Trout.
Sometimes I wonder about the Creator of the Universe.
Symbols can be so beautiful, sometimes.
A Book of Days — Patti Smith
This is the greatest gift that an artist bequeaths to future artists, igniting the desire to produce their own work.
18 February
As a young girl she lived through bombings and starvation in war torn Japan seeing the ravages of war, the terrible destruction and devastation, made a deep, lasting impression, impacting her unique voice as an artist and activist. On Yoko Ono’s birthday, may we all give peace a chance.
The bookcase by my bed, each volume a journey.
Road-side Dog — Czeslaw Milosz
To believe you are magnificent. And gradually to discover that you are not magnificent. Enough labor for one human life.
Thus I have to write, to save myself from disintegration. Not much philosophy in that statement, but at least it has been verified by experience.
Women seem to be closer to everyday disorder of viscous reality—though they are brave.
It seems they fit better the metaphor of our existence, which consists in continuing pretending that everything is all right and in hiding a basic incongruity.
Heaven answered with silence the moans of lashed serfs, the screams of crucified slaves, and the prayers of prisoners in the twentieth-century death camps. If it was God who created this world and submitted it to the blind law of force, then He was a moral monster and it was impossible to believe in Him.
California — Kevin Starr
It was, moreover, a deeply flawed and deficient society. The entire relationship of the Spanish settlers—Franciscans and soldiers alike—to the Native Americans was, by contemporary standards, problematic, indeed catastrophic.
The fact is that California supported art from the frontier days onward.
In 1944, bohemian writer Henry Miller planted the flag of anarchy in Big Sur, and this event, as well as any other, represented a watershed in the consolidation of dissent on the Left Coast.
Yet the drama of politics is not alway evident in the day-to-day operations of government, particularly when things are going reasonably well. Politics is a theater of opinion, and requires a drama with a plot, a story to tell.
Experience — Ralph Waldo Emerson
So much of our time is preparation, so much is routine, and so much retrospect, that the pith of each man’s genius contracts itself to a very few hours.
Nothing is left us now but death. We look to that with a grim satisfaction, saying, There at least is reality that will not dodge us.
Divinity is behind our failures and follies also.
Heed thy private dream.
Talking to My Body — Anna Swir
How long is a minus life,
nonexistence so much resembles immortality.
I want to be clean
as nothingness.
Love with Rucksacks
Two rucksacks,
two grey heads.
And the roads of all the world
for wandering.
Finding Them Gone
Visiting China’s Poets of the Past — Bill Porter / Red Pine
And what was life for anyway if not to thank those who made our lives happier?
It was the curse of the Muse. Connecting one’s mouth to one’s heart was a recipe for a drink that was often hard to swallow.
Nothing is quite so liberating as choosing to live on next to nothing, and doing it.
There is simply no way to anticipate life’s little jokes.
There is a downside to freedom. It is often accompanied by loneliness.
the unexpected can’t be avoided — Hsieh Ling-yun
don’t say an idle life is lived without desires — Fan Ch’eng-ta
Conversations — Czesław Miłosz — Edited by Cynthia L. Haven
You know, nobody chooses loneliness. Loneliness is felt as a catastrophe, as a curse, as a misfortune. But when you get to accept it, from today’s perspective, you can discern how it was necessary and how it was beneficial.
..in practicing poetry rightly, an act of struggle against, . . . against nothingness.
We discussed the question of writing as fighting chaos and nothingness. After having written such a poem I am relieved for the day. I did my share of fighting nothingness and chaos. For one day that is enough.
I stare and stare. It seems I was called for this:
To glorify things just because they are.
Last Car Over The Sagamore Bridge — Peter Orner
Even our own bodies betray us, every moment of every day.
I know now it’s easier to walk away from what you thought you couldn’t live without than I had once imagined.
Try throwing your weight around in a dream and see where it gets you.
Collected Poems — Gary Snyder
Riprap
Cold Mountain Poems
Myths & Texts
The Back Country
Regarding Wave
Turtle Island
Axe Handles
Left Out In The Rain
from No Nature
My wife is gone, my girl is
gone, my books are loaned, my clothes are worn,
I gave away a car, and all that happened years ago.
Mind & matter, love & space are frail as foam on
beer. Wallowing on and on.
~~~~~
You weren’t made right. I saved you,
And your three year life has been full
Of mild, steady pain.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
the wild freedom of the dance, exstasy
silent solitary illumination, entasy
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I would like to say
Coyote is forever
Inside you.
But it’s not true.
~~~~~~~~~~
Carry your own jug to the winery and have it filled from the barrel.
Relax around bugs, snakes, and your own hairy dreams.
~~~~~~~~~
Heaven lasts, Earth endures,
—and both will end;
This sorrow stretches on
forever, without limit.
~~~~~~~~
Fifty years old.
I still spend my time
Screwing nuts down on bolts.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
If “meditation on decay and rot cures lust”
I’m hopeless;
I delight in thoughts of fungus,
beetle larvae, stains
that suck the life still
from your old insides,
Under crystal sky.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I hope
Again some day
To hit the night road in America
Hitchhiking through dark towns
Rucksack on my back,
To the home of a
Poverty-stricken witty
Drunkard friend.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I saw my inattention,
Tiny moment in the thread,
Was where the whole world could have turned
And gone another way.
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