Old Blind Dogs, "Terror Time"

The heather will fade

Aye, bracken will die

Streams will run cold and clear

Aye, the small birds they'll be goin'

For it's then that you'll be knowin'

That the terror time is here ...

Telemann, Sonata in D-Major, TWV 44:1

The Bremer Barockorchester performs ...

Buxheimer Organ Book, Virginem mire pulchritudinis

Luca Pianca performs ...

Mozart Sonata in D-Major for Two Pianos, K.44

Elina Akselrud and Denis Zhdanov perform ...

Lucy Yeghiazaryan, "Sweet Pumpkin"

RUSH, "New World Man"

What if Stewart Copeland played with RUSH?

I got to know him and then got to know the band. And getting deeper into it, going to see them, I get it. I understand why people get all reverent about Rush.

Wedge.

Ten.

Tolkien, Rivendell, 1937

Frodo woke and found himself lying in bed under a richly carved wooden ceiling, listening to a waterfall.

"Where am I, and what is the time?" he said aloud.

"In the house of Elrond, and it is ten o'clock in the morning," replied Gandalf. "It is the morning of October the twenty-fourth, if you want to know."

J.R.R. Tolkien, from The Fellowship of The Ring

Still.

Yet.

The LOVE of OCTOBER

A child looking at ruins grows younger

but cold

and wants to wake to a new name

I have been younger in October

than in all the months of spring

walnut and may leaves the color

of shoulders at the end of summer

a month that has been to the mountain

and become light there

the long grass lies pointing uphill

even in death for a reason

that none of us knows

and the wren laughs in the early shade now

come again shining glance in your good time

naked air late morning

my love is for lightness

of touch foot feather

the day is yet one more yellow leaf

and without turning I kiss the light

by an old well on the last of the month

gathering wild rose hips

in the sun

W.S. Merwin

Fight.

The word impossible does not exist for me. I’ve got a lot of signal flags in my flag bag, but there is not a white one in there. I am going to keep fighting until the day I die — and might keep on fighting afterward, depends on where I am.

Ted Turner

Clifton Hicks, "Unquiet Grave"

Keeps.

Vermeer, The Milkmaid, 1660

VERMEER

So long as that woman from the Rijksmuseum

in painted quiet and concentration

keeps pouring milk day after day

from the pitcher to the bowl

the World hasn’t earned

the world’s end.

Wisława Szymborska 

Early.

But you take October, now. School’s been on a month and you’re riding easier in the reins, jogging along. You got time to think of the garbage you’ll dump on old man Prickett’s porch, or the hairy-ape costume you’ll wear to the YMCA the last night of the month. And if it’s around October twentieth and everything smoky-smelling and the sky orange and ash grey at twilight, it seems Hallowe’en will never come in a fall of broomsticks and a soft flap of bedsheets around corners.

But one strange wild dark long year, Hallowe’en came early.

One year Hallowe’en came on October 24, three hours after midnight.

Ray Bradbury, from Something Wicked This Way Comes

Thanks, Kurt.

John Anderson, Rest in Peace

Ol' John has passed.

If ya only know one piece o' gritter poetry b'heart, make it this'n, featuring the pedal steel artistry of Paul Franklin ...

Rekindles.

Homer, The Pumpkin Patch, 1878

"Jack-o'-Lantern, Jack-o'-Lantern,

Tell me where you hide by day?"

"In the cradle where the vapours

Dream the sunlit hours away."

"Jack-o'-Lantern, Jack-o'-Lantern,

Who rekindles you at night?"

"Any firefly in the meadow

Lends a Jack-o'-Lantern light."

John B. Tabb

Wish.

“There goes the Todd woman,” I said.

Homer Buckland watched the little Jaguar go by and nodded. The woman raised her hand to Homer. Homer nodded his big, shaggy head to her but didn’t raise his own hand in return. The Todd family had a big summer home on Castle Lake, and Homer had been their caretaker since time out of mind. I had an idea that he disliked Worth Todd’s second wife every bit as much as he’d liked ’Phelia Todd, the first one.

This was just about two years ago and we were sitting on a bench in front of Bell’s Market, me with an orange soda-pop, Homer with a glass of mineral water. It was October, which is a peaceful time in Castle Rock. Lots of the lake places still get used on the weekends, but the aggressive, boozy summer socializing is over by then and the hunters with their big guns and their expensive nonresident permits pinned to their orange caps haven’t started to come into town yet. Crops have been mostly laid by. Nights are cool, good for sleeping, and old joints like mine haven’t yet started to complain. In October the sky over the lake is passing fair, with those big white clouds that move so slow; I like how they seem so flat on the bottoms, and how they are a little gray there, like with a shadow of sundown foretold, and I can watch the sun sparkle on the water and not be bored for some space of minutes. It’s in October, sitting on the bench in front of Bell’s and watching the lake from afar off, that I still wish I was a smoking man.

Stephen King, from "Mrs Todd's Shortcut"

Thanks to Kurtastrophe for introducing me to this way, way back in those heady days.

Voices.

Steve suggested that I begin sharing the ideas my students come up with in my classroom, so may I introduce Voices in The Wood.

We were trying to define art, artists, and artistic talents ...

For me art is a metaphor or a myth. I fear a lot of people think of art as just a physical outcome: a painting, a song, a poem. And after many discussions people will think of it as an emotion or how it makes them feel: beautiful, creative, fury, regret, envy. But this is my problem, if art can make you feel a unique specific emotion, why don't they call themselves a beautyist, furyist, and so on, because that describes the specific emotion. 

Abby

I'm a wonder-ist.  You?

Happy Birthday, Robert Bridges

LOW BAROMETER

The south-wind strengthens to a gale,

Across the moon the clouds fly fast,

The house is smitten as with a flail,

The chimney shudders to the blast.

On such a night, when Air has loosed

Its guardian grasp on blood and brain,

Old terrors then of god or ghost

Creep from their caves to life again;

And Reason kens he herits in

A haunted house. Tenants unknown

Assert their squalid lease of sin

With earlier title than his own.

Unbodied presences, the pack’d

Pollution and remorse of Time,

Slipp’d from oblivion reënact

The horrors of unhouseld crime.

Some men would quell the thing with prayer

Whose sightless footsteps pad the floor,

Whose fearful trespass mounts the stair

Or burts the lock’d forbidden door.

Some have seen corpses long interr'd

Escape from hallowing control,

Pale charnel forms—nay ev’n have heard

The shrilling of a troubled soul,

That wanders till the dawn hath cross’d

The dolorous dark, or Earth hath wound

Closer her storm-spredd cloke, and thrust

The baleful phantoms underground.

Robert Bridges, born on this day in 1844

Old Blind Dogs, "Tatties and Herrin'"

But awa tae the north

'Mongst the brave and the darin'

Tae the lads that were brocht up

On tatties and herrin' ...

Tremendous.

Audubon: A New Golden Age of Observation Is Revealing the Wonders of Night Migration ...

Billions of birds travel north in spring and south in fall, hundreds of species keeping a cycle of movement, and they do so primarily at night. While some large birds like hawks, cranes, and waterfowl are daytime travelers, most migrants—including the vast majority of songbirds—are on the wing in the dark. The reasons include a calmer atmosphere, guidance from the stars, and safety from predators. Meanwhile we humans by and large have no inkling of the tremendous journeys made while we sleep. Even for those who study migration, the story is unfolding in ways never before possible.

Accompaniment ...

Happy Birthday, Franz Liszt

For a whole fortnight my mind and my fingers have been working around me like two lost souls. Homer, the Bible, Plato, Locke, Byron, Hugo, Lamartine, Chateaubriand, Beethoven, Bach, Hummel, Mozart, Weber are all around me. I study them, meditate on them, devour them with fury; besides this, I practice four to five hours a day of exercises (thirds, sixths, octaves, tremolos, repetition of notes, cadenzas, etc.). Ah! provided I don't go mad, you will find me an artist!

Franz Liszt, born on this day in 1811

Vladimir Horowitz plays Liszt's Consolation No. 3 ...

Happy Birthday, Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Allston, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1814

FROST at MIDNIGHT

The Frost performs its secret ministry,
Unhelped by any wind. The owlet's cry
Came loud—and hark, again! loud as before.
The inmates of my cottage, all at rest,
Have left me to that solitude, which suits
Abstruser musings: save that at my side
My cradled infant slumbers peacefully.
'Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbs
And vexes meditation with its strange
And extreme silentness. Sea, hill, and wood,
This populous village! Sea, and hill, and wood,
With all the numberless goings-on of life,
Inaudible as dreams! the thin blue flame
Lies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not;
Only that film, which fluttered on the grate,

Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing.
Methinks, its motion in this hush of nature
Gives it dim sympathies with me who live,
Making it a companionable form,
Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit
By its own moods interprets, every where
Echo or mirror seeking of itself,
And makes a toy of Thought.

But O! how oft,
How oft, at school, with most believing mind,
Presageful, have I gazed upon the bars,
To watch that fluttering stranger ! and as oft
With unclosed lids, already had I dreamt
Of my sweet birth-place, and the old church-tower,
Whose bells, the poor man's only music, rang
From morn to evening, all the hot Fair-day,
So sweetly, that they stirred and haunted me
With a wild pleasure, falling on mine ear
Most like articulate sounds of things to come!
So gazed I, till the soothing things, I dreamt,
Lulled me to sleep, and sleep prolonged my dreams!
And so I brooded all the following morn,
Awed by the stern preceptor's face, mine eye
Fixed with mock study on my swimming book:
Save if the door half opened, and I snatched
A hasty glance, and still my heart leaped up,
For still I hoped to see the stranger's face,
Townsman, or aunt, or sister more beloved,
My play-mate when we both were clothed alike!

Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side,
Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm,
Fill up the intersperséd vacancies
And momentary pauses of the thought!
My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart
With tender gladness, thus to look at thee,
And think that thou shalt learn far other lore,
And in far other scenes! For I was reared
In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim,
And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.
But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze
By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags
Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,
Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores
And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
Of that eternal language, which thy God
Utters, who from eternity doth teach
Himself in all, and all things in himself.
Great universal Teacher! he shall mould
Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.

Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch
Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall
Heard only in the trances of the blast,
Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, born on this day in 1772

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Happy Birthday, Arthur Rimbaud

My turn now. The story of one of my insanities.

For a long time I boasted that I was master of all possible landscapes-- and I thought the great figures of modern painting and poetry were laughable.

What I liked were: absurd paintings, pictures over doorways, stage sets, carnival backdrops, billboards, bright-colored prints, old-fashioned literature, church Latin, erotic books full of misspellings, the kind of novels our grandmothers read, fairy tales, little children's books, old operas, silly old songs, the naive rhythms of country rimes.

I dreamed of Crusades, voyages of discovery that nobody had heard of, republics without histories, religious wars stamped out, revolutions in morals, movements of races and continents; I used to believe in every kind of magic.

I invented colors for the vowels! A black, E white, I red, O blue, U green. I made rules for the form and movement of every consonant, and I boasted of inventing, with rhythms from within me, a kind of poetry that all the senses, sooner or later, would recognize. And I alone would be its translator.

I began it as an investigation. I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.

Arthur Rimbaud, born on this day in 1854, from "Alchemy of the Word"

Attentiveness.

Chatham, Grass Fires, 1989

Gullies, hummocks in swamps, swales in the middle of large fields, the small alluvial fan created by feeder creeks, undercut riverbanks, miniature springs, dense thickets on the tops of hills; like Bachelard’s attics, seashells, drawers, cellars, these places are a balm to me.  Magic is equated to the quality of attentiveness.

Jim Harrison, from “Passacaglia on Getting Lost”

Mad.

Happy Birthday, e.e. cummings

To be nobody but yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you just like everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight – and never stop fighting.

As for expressing, that means working just a little harder than anybody who isn’t a poet can possibly imagine. 

Why? Because nothing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else. We, all of us, do exactly this nearly all of the time – and whenever we do it, we’re not poets.

e.e. cummings, born on this day in 1894

Remembering.

Anders, Earthrise, 1968

Remembering is a noble and necessary act. The call of memory, the call to memory, reaches us from the very dawn of history. No commandment figures so frequently, so insistently, in the Bible. It is incumbent upon us to remember the good we have received, and the evil we have suffered ... On the day of universal judgment, man appeals to God to remember: our salvation depends on it. If God wishes to remember our suffering, all will be well; if He refuses, all will be lost. Thus, the rejection of memory becomes a divine curse, one that would doom us to repeat past disasters, past wars.

Elie Wiesel, from his 1986 Nobel lecture, "Hope, Despair and Memory"

Happy Birthday, Sammy Hagar

Sammy Hagar was born on this day in 1947.

"Turn Up the Music"...

Same.

Do we see the same sky as Crazy Horse?

Jim Harrsion, from "Passacaglia on Getting Lost"

Steve Winwood, "Dear Mr. Fantasy"

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Sing.

An Oyster Months anthem to learn and sing ...

Purcell, Welcome to All the Pleasures, Z. 339

Antonin Rondepierre performs "Here the Deities Approve" with theorbist Gabriel Rignol ...

Fun.

It is more civilized to make fun of life than to bewail it.

Seneca, from On the Shortness of Life

Truer.

Anne Carson (from "Life is Not Fair") has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

That attention to details leads you somewhere truer than generalizing ...

Noticing.

When existence reveals itself as existentially intolerable, thinking collapses in on itself. In such situations—in the depths—it's noticing, not thinking, that does the trick.

Jordan B. Peterson, from 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

I would add that appreciation is required, as well.

That being said, thanks to Walker's Arms for the image and the respite.

Wonder.

ANOTHER POEM of the GIFTS

I want to give thanks to the divine

Labyrinth of causes and effects

For the diversity of beings

That form this singular universe,

For Reason, that will never give up its dream

Of a map of the labyrinth,

For Helen’s face and the perseverance of Ulysses,

For love, which lets us see others

As God sees them,

For the solid diamond and the flowing water,

For Algebra, a palace of exact crystals,

For the mystic coins of Angelus Silesius,

For Schopenhauer,

Who perhaps deciphered the universe,

For the blazing of fire,

That no man can look at without an ancient wonder,

For mahogany, cedar, and sandalwood,

For bread and salt,

For the mystery of the rose

That spends all its colour and can not see it,

For certain eves and days of 1955,

For the hard riders who, on the plains,

Drive on the cattle and the dawn,

For mornings in Montevideo,

For the art of friendship,

For Socrates’ last day,

For the words spoken one twilight

From one cross to another,

For that dream of Islam that embraced

A thousand nights and a night,

For that other dream of Hell,

Of the tower of cleansing fire

And of the celestial spheres,

For Swedenborg,

Who talked with the angels in London streets,

For the secret and immemorial rivers

That converge in me,

For the language that, centuries ago, I spoke in Northumberland,

For the sword and harp of the Saxons,

For the sea, which is a shining desert

And a secret code for things we do not know

And an epitaph for the Norsemen,

For the word music of England,

For the word music of Germany,

For gold, that shines in verses,

For epic winter,

For the title of a book I have not read: Gesta Dei per Francos,

For Verlaine, innocent as the birds,

For crystal prisms and bronze weights,

For the tiger’s stripes,

For the high towers of San Francisco and Manhattan Island,

For mornings in Texas,

For that Sevillian who composed the Moral Epistle

And whose name, as he would have wished, we do not know,

For Seneca and Lucan, both of Cordova,

Who, before there was Spanish, had written

All Spanish literature,

For gallant, noble, geometric chess,

For Zeno’s tortoise and Royce’s map,

For the medicinal smell of eucalyptus trees,

For speech, which can be taken for wisdom,

For forgetfulness, which annuls or modifies the past,

For habits,

Which repeat us and confirm us in our image like a mirror,

For morning, that gives us the illusion of a new beginning,

For night, its darkness and its astronomy,

For the bravery and happiness of others,

For my country, sensed in jasmine flowers

Or in an old sword,

For Whitman and Francis of Assisi, who already wrote this poem,

For the fact that the poem is inexhaustible

And becomes one with the sum of all created things

And will never reach its last verse

And varies according to its writers

For Frances Haslam, who begged her children’s pardon

For dying so slowly,

For the minutes that precede sleep,

For sleep and death,

Those two hidden treasures,

For the intimate gifts I do not mention,

For music, that mysterious form of time.

Jorge Luis Borges

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Bach, Jesu, der du meine Seele, BWV 78

The Netherlands Bach Society performs featuring Maria Keohane, soprano, Tim Mead, alto, Daniel Johannsen, tenor, Matthew Brook, bass, conducted by Jos van Veldhoven ...

Happy Birthday, Frederic Remington

Remington, The Outlier, 1909

Frederic Remington was born on this day in 1861.

Holborne, The Night Watch

Valery Sauvage performs ...

Happy Birthday, Jean-François Millet

Millet, Autumn Landscape with a Flock of Turkeys, 1873

It is the treating of the commonplace with the feelings of the sublime that gives to art its true power.  Art will never come except from some small disregarded corner where an isolated and inspired man is studying the mysteries of nature. 

Jean-Francois Millet, born on this day in 1814

Released.

The Police released their best album, Zenyatta Mondatta, on this day in 1980.

"Man in a Suitcase"...

Happy Birthday, Stevie Ray Vaughan

Stevie Ray Vaughan was born on this day in 1954.

"The Things (That) I Used to Do"...