There never was a Golden Age,
a time much better than right now.
But playing martyr 's all the rage:
to think our world the garbage scow --
whose stinking mass forever grows.
Lest you think that I'm saying these
are times of pure and sweet repose,
Please, let me put your mind at ease:
These times are best. These times are worst.
(To blatantly steal from Dickens.)
This twist is just how we are cursed
to shriek like that sky fall chicken.
Each of us lives a life improbable, the gift of an ancestor who struggled through some terror which killed others. We each have an iron impulse to maintain a cracking grip on life, but some won't ever be pried away, growing like the stunted pine that juts from the mountainside: gnarled but indestructible. Live improbably with your life improbable.
Our plight is craving perfection
in an imperfect world:
imperfectly perceived,
imperfectly performed,
imperfectly programmed.
To have a mind that can imagine perfection,
but never attain it
creates a special hell vehicle.
No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings.
william blake
The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
William blake
Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion.
William Blake
The fox condemns the trap, not himself.
William Blake
Exuberance is Beauty.
William blake
Without Contraries is no Progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence.
William Blake
If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.
William blake
The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.
William Blake
I also asked Isaiah what made him go naked and barefoot three years. He answer’d: ‘The same that made our friend Diogenes, the Grecian.’
William Blake
The most sublime act is to set another before you.
William blake
NOTE: William Blake’s “The Marriage of Heaven in Hell” is available in many collections of his poetry, and is in the public domain and available via Project Gutenberg at: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/45315
Why, who makes much of a miracle? As to me I know of nothing else but miracles.
Walt Whitman, “miracles”
The American contempt for statues and ceremonies, the boundless impatience for restraint…
Walt whitman, “Song of the Broad-axe”
I exist as I am, that is enough. If no other in the world would be aware I sit content. And if each and all be aware I sit content.
walt whitman, “Song of myself”
I am not the poet of goodness only, I do not decline to be the poet of wickedness also.
walt whitman, “song of myself”
If any thing is sacred the human body is sacred.
Walt whitman, “i sing the body electric”
NOTES: Numerous editions exist between the 1855 and 1892 (deathbed) edition. It’s available for free on Project Gutenberg at: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1322
The flawless deep green melon rind
houses a pink, bland flesh.
The rind - pitted, yellowed, lumpy -
hides fruit: red, sweet, & fresh.
A construction worker once told me -
for a building to last -
depends not so much on
its materials,
nor even on its foundations,
but rather on the building being
in balanced strain throughout.
A building stays up when its
parts press into each other firmly,
or pull at each other strongly,
but never too out of balance.
This web of unseen forces
allows the building stand solid
against any huffing, or puffing,
the world might throw its way.
A democratic society works the same.
It must have an establishment.
It must have a counterculture.
And these two elements must
constantly pull at each other
or mash into each other:
tension & compression,
compression & tension,
tug-of-war & sumo.
If one side is unopposed, or too weak,
the state will crumble into some kind of
authoritarianism by another name.
Destroy your enemies at your own peril.
What will be your master,
and what will be your slave?
Will you court disaster
to be perceived as brave?
Will you call your pastor
to hide that which you crave,
or be your own ringmaster
and own how you behave?
And will you choose virtue,
or live in fear of vice?
Will you choose to be true,
or default to being nice?
And when there's much ado
will you jet their paradise?
Or just defer your view,
as act some men and mice?
Bury the ordinary,
but make sure to
chop it out at the roots.
Nothing grows back more tenaciously
than the commonplace or the quotidian.
Sometimes what grows
back from those roots
looks entirely different,
but it's still mundane.
It has the same feel,
even when it has a
very different look.
Kill it.
Murder it.
Chop it up.
Bury it,
and let it die the death
of the forgotten.
Some speculate about
the edge of the universe,
and what exists beyond.
But that edge - if it exists -
is beyond another edge:
the farthest points
from which we can see light.
In a tower
on a mountain,
there's still an edge
of our eyesight --
like the others,
it's an edgeless edge,
signifying nothing
but our own limitations.
We are builders
of edgeless edges,
fashioning boundaries
that don't bound anything,
but by which we are bound.
Tiger Riding for Beginners 