Excellent.

An excellent album ...

CSN & Y, "Johnny's Garden"

On.

Botticelli, The Birth of Venus (detail), 1486

KING WIND

Of all the weathers wind is king.
Snow would not blow, rain would not beat,
Nor green grasses ripple, nor trees break, 
Except for the will of this blind thing
That neither is seen nor sees, but anyway
Comes, and anyway goes -- from where
To where?  Nobody knows.

I never am tired of thinking of him.
Even in sleep -- but where is his bed? --
He dreams of filling the world again
With waves of water and walls of air
That neither can stop nor stand, but anyway
Rise, and anyway, fall.  So on
Forever.  Motion is all.

Mark Van Doren

Sacred.

Roger Scruton and Hamza Yusuf discuss sacred truths ...

Truly.

The colonel breakfasted with the leisure of a fighter who has been clipped badly, hears four, and knows how to relax truly for five more seconds.

Ernest Hemingway, from Across the River and Into the Trees

Ray Davies, "Waterloo Sunset"

Happy birthday, Lee.

Geddy Lee was born on this day in 1953.

"Working Man"

Smetana, The Moldau

Nikolaus Harnoncourt directs the Chamber Orchestra of Europe ...

Madness.

If a man comes to the door of poetry untouched by the madness of the Muses, believing that technique alone will make him a good poet, he and his sane compositions never reach perfection, but are utterly eclipsed by the performances of the inspired madman.

Socrates

Motion.

The wind abides nowhere.

Or it isn’t the wind;

it is the motion of the mind
through pine boughs.

Dan Gerber

Haydn, Piano Trio No. 39 in G major Hob. XV:25, "Gypsy"

Gernoth Süssmuth, violin, Jelena Očić, cello, and Jose Gallardo, piano, perform ...

Indepen-DANCE.

Indepen-DANCE.

Neil Young, "Cowgirl in the Sand"

Marty Stuart & His Fabulous Superlatives, "Stop The World (And Let Me Off)"

Iron Maiden, "Run To The Hills"

Run.

Marty Stuart & His Fabulous Superlatives, "The Runnin' Kind"

Marty Stuart & His Fabulous Superlatives, "Runnin' Down a Dream"

Momentous.

Wyeth, Bucket Post, 1953

For many years, my walks have taken me down an old fencerow in a wooded hollow on what was once my grandfather’s farm. A battered galvanized bucket is hanging on a fence post near the head of the hollow, and I never go by it without stopping to look inside. For what is going on in that bucket is the most momentous thing I know, the greatest miracle that I have ever heard of: it is making earth. The old bucket has hung there through many autumns, and the leaves have fallen around it and some have fallen into it. Rain and snow have fallen into it, and the fallen leaves have held the moisture and so have rotted. Nuts have fallen into it, or been carried into it by squirrels; mice and squirrels have eaten the meat of the nuts and left the shells; they and other animals have left their droppings; insects have flown into the bucket and died and decayed; birds have scratched in it and left their droppings or perhaps a feather or two. This slow work of growth and death, gravity and decay, which is the chief work of the world, has by now produced in the bottom of the bucket several inches of black humus. I look into that bucket with fascination because I am a farmer of sorts and an artist of sorts, and I recognize there an artistry and a farming far superior to mine, or to that of any human. I have seen the same process at work on the tops of boulders in a forest, and it has been at work immemorially over most of the land surface of the world. All creatures die into it, and they live by it.

Wendel Berry

Big-time.

Sergeant De Sales A. Glover of the 458th Bomb Group poses next to his ship Big Time Operator with his waist gun and ammunition.  He had completed six missions with the group and won an Air Medal before authorities discovered he was only 16 years old, at which point he was honorably discharged from service.

Thank you, United States Army Air Corps.

Happy birthday, Potter.

Beatrix Potter was born on this day in 1866.

The place is changed now, and many familiar faces are gone, but the greatest change is myself. I was a child then, I had no idea what the world would be like. I wished to trust myself on the waters and the sea. Everything was romantic in my imagination. The woods were peopled by the mysterious good folk. The Lords and Ladies of the last century walked with me along the overgrown paths, and picked the old fashioned flowers among the box and rose hedges of the garden.  I remember I used to half believe and wholly play with fairies when I was a child. What heaven can be more real than to retain the spirit-world of childhood, tempered and balanced by knowledge and common-sense.

Beatrix Potter

The Strange Life of Beatrix Potter: A Story of Rabbits and Mushrooms ...

Mustard.

Get some mustard for Jose Iglesias  ...

Moonlight.

Robinson, "A Toy"

Margret Köll , harp, and Luca Pianca, lute, perform ...

Simply Red, "Mellow My Mind"

Where.

Now has come, an easy time. I let it

roll. There is a lake somewhere

so blue and far nobody owns it.

A wind comes by, and a willow listens

gracefully.

I hear all this, every summer. I laugh

and cry for every turn of the world,

its terribly cold, innocent spin.

That lake stays blue and free; it goes

on and on.  

And I know where it is.

William Stafford

Jamey Johnson, "I Think I'll Just Stay Here and Drink"

"Cowboy" Eddie Long, pedal steel ...



HAPPY FRIDAY!

Friday.

HAPPY FRIDAY!

Vividly.

There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street. There are images tucked away in books that live more vividly than many men and women. There are phrases from literary works that have a positively human personality.  I've written sentences whose sound, read out loud or silently, impossible to hide their sound, can only be of something that acquired absolute exteriority and a full-fledged soul. As I walk, I construct perfect sentences that I cannot remember later at home. I don’t know if the ineffable poetry of those sentences derived from what they were or from their never having been.

Fernando Passoa

Marty Stuart & His Fabulous Superlatives, "Time Don't Wait"

Another.

Eisenstaedt, Puppet Show, 1963

Don't limit a child to your own learning, for she was born in another time.

Rabindranath Tagore

Schubert, Piano Quintet in A major, D.667, "Trout"

The Borodin Quartet performs with Alexei Volodin, piano, and Artem Chirkov, double bass ...

Measure.

The real damage is done by those millions who want to 'survive.' The honest men who just want to be left in peace. Those who don’t want their little lives disturbed by anything bigger than themselves. Those with no sides and no causes. Those who won’t take measure of their own strength, for fear of antagonizing their own weakness. Those who don’t like to make waves—or enemies. Those for whom freedom, honour, truth, and principles are only literature. Those who live small, mate small, die small. It’s the reductionist approach to life: if you keep it small, you’ll keep it under control. If you don’t make any noise, the bogeyman won’t find you. But it’s all an illusion, because they die too, those people who roll up their spirits into tiny little balls so as to be safe. Safe?! From what? Life is always on the edge of death; narrow streets lead to the same place as wide avenues, and a little candle burns itself out just like a flaming torch does. I choose my own way to burn.

Sophie Scholl

Of course, the terrible things I heard from the Nuremberg Trials, about the six million Jews and the people from other races who were killed, were facts that shocked me deeply. But I wasn’t able to see the connection with my own past. I was satisfied that I wasn’t personally to blame and that I hadn’t known about those things. I wasn’t aware of the extent. But one day I went past the memorial plaque which had been put up for Sophie Scholl in Franz Josef Strasse, and I saw that she was born the same year as me, and she was executed the same year I started working for Hitler. And at that moment I actually sensed that it was no excuse to be young, and that it would have been possible to find things out.

Traudl Junge, Adolf Hitler's personal secretary, 1942-1945

CONNECT

Pleasures.

To the Technocrats: Have mercy on us. Relax a bit, take time out for simple pleasures. For example, the luxuries of electricity, indoor plumbing, central heating, instant electronic communication and such, have taught me to relearn and enjoy the basic human satisfactions of dipping water from a cold clear mountain stream; of building a wood fire in a cast-iron stove; of using long winter nights for making music, making things, making love; of writing long letters, in longhand with a fountain pen, to the few people on this earth I truly care about.

Ed Abbey

Mechanization.

To begin with, there is the frightful debauchery of taste that has already been effected by a century of mechanization. This is almost too obvious and too generally admitted to need pointing out. But as a single instance, take taste in its narrowest sense - the taste for decent food. In the highly mechanical countries, thanks to tinned food, cold storage, synthetic flavoring matters, etc., the palate it almost a dead organ. As you can see by looking at any greengrocer’s shop, what the majority of English people mean by an apple is a lump of highly-colored cotton wool from America or Australia; they will devour these things, apparently with pleasure, and let the English apples rot under the trees. It is the shiny, standardized, machine-made look of the American apple that appeals to them; the superior taste of the English apple is something they simply do not notice. Or look at the factory-made, foil wrapped cheeses and ‘blended’ butter in an grocer’s; look at the hideous rows of tins which usurp more and more of the space in any food-shop, even a dairy; look at a sixpenny Swiss roll or a twopenny ice-cream; look at the filthy chemical by-product that people will pour down their throats under the name of beer. Wherever you look you will see some slick machine-made article triumphing over the old-fashioned article that still tastes of something other than sawdust. And what applies to food applies also to furniture, houses, clothes, books, amusements and everything else that makes up our environment. These are now millions of people, and they are increasing every year, to whom the blaring of a radio is not only a more acceptable but a more normal background to their thoughts than the lowing of cattle or the song of birds. The mechanization of the world could never proceed very far while taste, even the taste-buds of the tongue, remained uncorrupted, because in that case most of the products of the machine would be simply unwanted. In a healthy world there would be no demand for tinned food, aspirins, gramophones, gas-pipe chairs, machine guns, daily newspapers, telephones, motor-cars, etc. etc.; and on the other hand there would be a constant demand for the things the machine cannot produce. But meanwhile the machine is here, and its corrupting effects are almost irresistible. One inveighs against it, but one goes on using it. Even a bare-arse savage, given the change, will learn the vices of civilization within a few months. Mechanization leads to the decay of taste, the decay of taste leads to demand for machine-made articles and hence to more mechanization, and so a vicious circle is established.

George Orwell, from The Road to Wigan Pier

Beethoven, Trio for piano, violin and cello No. 4 in B flat major, op.11

Eugene Istomin, piano, Leonard Rose, cello, and Isaac Stern, violín, perform ...

Happy birthday, Belloc.

Hilaire Belloc was born on this day in 1870.

LINES to a DON

Remote and ineffectual Don

That dared attack my Chesterton,

With that poor weapon, half-impelled,

Unlearnt, unsteady, hardly held,

Unworthy for a tilt with men--

Your quavering and corroded pen;

Don poor at Bed and worse at Table,

Don pinched, Don starved, Don miserable;

Don stuttering, Don with roving eyes,

Don nervous, Don of crudities;

Don clerical, Don ordinary,

Don self-absorbed and solitary;

Don here-and-there, Don epileptic;

Don puffed and empty, Don dyspeptic;

Don middle-class, Don sycophantic,

Don dull, Don brutish, Don pedantic;

Don hypocritical, Don bad,

Don furtive, Don three-quarters mad;

Don (since a man must make and end),

Don that shall never be my friend.

Don different from those regal Dons!

With hearts of gold and lungs of bronze,

Who shout and bang and roar and bawl

The Absolute across the hall,

Or sail in amply bellying gown

Enormous through the Sacred Town,

Bearing from College to their homes

Deep cargoes of gigantic tomes;

Dons admirable! Dons of Might!

Uprising on my inward sight

Compact of ancient tales, and port

And sleep--and learning of a sort.

Dons English, worthy of the land;

Dons rooted; Dons that understand.

Good Dons perpetual that remain

A landmark, walling in the plain--

The horizon of my memories--

Like large and comfortable trees.

Don very much apart from these,

Thou scapegoat Don, thou Don devoted,

Don to thine own damnation quoted,

Perplexed to find thy trivial name

Reared in my verse to lasting shame.

Don dreadful, rasping Don and wearing,

Repulsive Don--Don past all bearing.

Don of the cold and doubtful breath,

Don despicable, Don of death;

Don nasty, skimpy, silent, level;

Don evil, Don that serves the devil.

Don ugly--that makes fifty lines.

There is a Canon which confines

A Rhymed Octosyllabic Curse

If written in Iambic Verse

To fifty lines. I never cut;

I far prefer to end it--but

Believe me I shall soon return.

My fires are banked, but still they burn

To write some more about the Don

That dared attack my Chesterton.

Hilaire Belloc

Careful.

There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.

Herman Melville

Bread, "Guitar Man"

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Forgotten.

Chatham, Landscape of a Dark Forest, 1988

I want to tell what the forests

were like

I will have to speak

in a forgotten language

W.S. Merwin

Whatever.

HYPOTHESIS

Let this be home: the house we never had,

a box of lights, a jar of copper nails,

cat's bones and feathers

an arm's length into the chimney.

Deep in the garden

the edges wander and blur

convolvulus winds through the flowers, the violets drift

spotting the ditches with colour beyond the canal.

Some nights, the fox slips by

in blood-orange light,

leaving his kill; the wet pelt the frost-threaded eyes,

the bones in the ceanothus, becoming dust,

and waking will sometimes resemble

the sudden precision of gunshots out in the field,

when the woods are immersed 

in a clear and improbable dawn.

and traces everywhere of what is risen;

bonemeal and horsehair, a fingerprint etched in the 

   dust,

whatever it is that fades when we enter a room,

leaves only the glitter of brass, and the gloved noise of

   water.

John Burnside

Frank Sinatra, "I Won't Dance"

Open.

I rest not from my great task!

To open the Eternal Worlds, to open the immortal Eyes

Of Man inwards into the Worlds of Thought, into Eternity
Ever expanding in the Bosom of God, the Human Imagination.

William Blake

Dog.

Frank Sinatra, "Lonesome Road"

D-wight Lightnin', "Guitars, Cadillacs"

Another lesson 'bout a naive fool who came to Babylon

And found out that the pie don't taste so sweet ...

Studebaker John, "Shake Some for Me"

Jackson Browne, "For Everyman"

Imagination.

Blake, The Song of Los, copy B, object 5, 1795

I know of no other Christianity and of no other Gospel than the liberty both of body and mind to exercise the Divine Arts of Imagination—Imagination, the real and Eternal World of which this Vegetable Universe is but a faint shadow, and in which we shall live in our Eternal or Imaginative Bodies, when these Vegetable Mortal Bodies are no more. The Apostles knew of no other Gospel. What were all their spiritual gifts? What is the Divine Spirit? Is the Holy Ghost any other than an Intellectual Fountain? What is the harvest of the Gospel and its labours? What is that talent which it is a curse to hide? What are the treasures of Heaven which we are to lay up for ourselves? Are they any other than mental studies and performances? What are all the gifts of the Gospel? Are they not all mental gifts? Is God a Spirit who must be worshipped in spirit and in truth? And are not the gifts of the Spirit everything to Man? O ye Religious, discountenance every one among you who shall pretend to despise Art and Science! I call upon you in the name of Jesus! What is the life of Man but Art and Science?

William Blake