Anyone who has
chanced like me
to roam through
desolate mountains
and studied at length
their fantastic shapes
and drunk
the invigorating air
of their valleys
can understand
why I wish
to describe
and depict
these magic scenes
for others.
--Mikhail Lermontov
All of us,
if we are of
reflective habit,
like and admire men
whose fundamental beliefs
differ radically
from our own.
But when a candidate
for public office
faces the voters
he does not face
men of sense;
he faces a mob of men
whose chief distinguishing
mark is the fact that
they are quite incapable
of weighing ideas, or even
of comprehending any
save the most elemental —
men whose whole thinking
is done in terms of emotion,
and whose dominant emotion
is dread of what they cannot understand.
So confronted, the candidate must either
bark with the pack or count himself lost.
All the odds are on
the man who is, intrinsically,
the most devious and mediocre —
the man who can most adeptly
disperse the notion
that his mind is a virtual vacuum.
The Presidency tends, year by year,
to go to such men.
As democracy is perfected,
the office represents,
more and more closely,
the inner soul of the people.
We move toward a lofty ideal.
On some great and glorious day
the plain folks of the land
will reach their heart's desire at last,
and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
--H.L. Mencken
VISHNU TEMPLE WITH NOMADS
PILGRIMS NEARING HANCE RAPID
TRAMPING INTO TURQUOISE CANYON
THE FOOL ABOVE HERMIT CANYON
MOOSE AND SHINUMO AMPHITHEATER
This time, there’s no question of freeing yourself from artifice to taste simple joys. Instead there is the promise of meeting a freedom head-on as an outer limit of the self and of the human, an internal overflowing of a rebellious Nature that goes beyond you. Walking can provoke these excesses: surfeits of fatigue that make the mind wander, abundances of beauty that turn the soul over, excesses of drunkenness on the peaks, the high passes (where the body explodes). Walking ends by awakening this rebellious, archaic part of us: our appetites become rough and uncompromising, our impulses inspired. Because walking puts us on the vertical axis of life: swept along by the torrent that rushes just beneath us. What I mean is that by walking you are not going to meet yourself. By walking, you escape from the very idea of identity, the temptation to be someone, to have a name and a history. Being someone is all very well for smart parties where everyone is telling their story, it’s all very well for psychologists’ consulting rooms. But isn’t being someone also a social obligation which trails in its wake – for one has to be faithful to the self-portrait – a stupid and burdensome fiction? The freedom in walking lies in not being anyone; for the walking body has no history, it is just an eddy in the stream of immemorial life. **
Oscar Peterson / Milt Jackson: On Green Dolphin Street
But walking causes absorption. Walking interminably, taking in through your pores the height of the mountains when you are confronting them at length, breathing in the shape of the hills for hours at a time during a slow descent. The body becomes steeped in the earth it treads. And thus, gradually, it stops being in the landscape: it becomes the landscape. That doesn’t have to mean dissolution, as if the walker were fading away to become a mere inflection, a footnote. It’s more a flashing moment: sudden flame, time catching fire. And here, the feeling of eternity is all at once that vibration between presences. Eternity, here, in a spark. **
The Native Americans, whose wisdom Thoreau admired, regarded the Earth itself as a sacred source of energy. To stretch out on it brought repose, to sit on the ground ensured greater wisdom in councils, to walk in contact with its gravity gave strength and endurance.
The Earth was an inexhaustible well of strength: because it was the original Mother, the feeder, but also because it enclosed in its bosom all the dead ancestors.
It was the element in which transmission took place. Thus, instead of stretching their hands skyward to implore the mercy of celestial divinities, American Indians preferred to walk barefoot on the Earth: The Lakota was a true Naturist – a lover of Nature. He loved the earth and all things of the earth, the attachment growing with age. The old people came literally to love the soil and they sat or reclined on the ground with a feeling of being close to a mothering power. It was good for the skin to touch the earth and the old people liked to remove their moccasins and walk with bare feet on the sacred earth. Their tipis were built upon the earth and their altars were made of earth. The birds that flew in the air came to rest on the earth and it was the final abiding place of all things that lived and grew. The soil was soothing, strengthening, cleansing and healing. That is why the old Indian still sits upon the earth instead of propping himself up and away from its life-giving forces. For him, to sit or lie upon the ground is to be able to think more deeply and to feel more keenly; he can see more clearly into the mysteries of life and come closer in kinship to other lives about him. Walking, by virtue of having the earth’s support, feeling its gravity, resting on it with every step, is very like a continuous breathing in of energy. But the earth’s force is not transmitted only in the manner of a radiation climbing through the legs. It is also through the coincidence of circulations: walking is movement, the heart beats more strongly, with a more ample beat, the blood circulates faster and more powerfully than when the body is at rest. And the earth’s rhythms draw that along, they echo and respond to each other. A last source of energy, after the heart and the Earth, is landscapes. They summon the walker and make him at home: the hills, the colors, the trees all confirm it. The charm of a twisting path among hills, the beauty of vine fields in autumn, like purple and gold scarves, the silvery glitter of olive leaves against a defining summer sky, the immensity of perfectly sliced glaciers … all these things support, transport and nourish us.
The first man who,
having fenced off
a plot of land,
thought of saying, This is mine
and found people
simple enough to
believe him
was the real founder
of civil society.
How many crimes,
wars, murders,
how many miseries
and horrors
might the human race
have been spared
by the one who,
upon pulling up the stakes
or filling in the ditch,
had shouted to his fellow men: Beware of listening
to this imposter.
You are lost if you forget
the fruits of the earth belong to all
and that the earth belongs to no one.
--Jean-Jacques Rousseau Discourse on Inequality
Simon and Garfunkel: Scarborough Fair
(Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme)
O sweet spontaneous
earth how often have
the
doting
fingers of
purient philosophers pinched
and
poked
thee
,has the naughty thumb
of science prodded
thy
beauty .how
oftn have religions taken
thee upon their scraggy knees
squeezing and
buffeting thee
that thou
mightest conceive
gods
(but
true
to the incomparable
couch of death thy
rhythmic
lover
thou answerest
them only with
spring)
According to Q-Jo,
the whole tarot deck,
or at least the twenty-two
trump cards of the Major Arcana,
may be read as the Fool's journey. On one important level,
she explained, the major cards are chapters
in the story of a quest.
I'm talking the universal
human quest for understanding
and divine reunion.
And it doesn't matter whether
the quest starts with the Fool
or ends with him,
because it's a loop anyhow,
a cycle endlessly repeated.
When the naive young Fool
finally tumbles over the precipice,
he falls into
the world of experience.
Now his journey has really begun.
Along the way, he'll meet
all the teachers and tempters -
the tempters are teachers, too -
and challenging situations
that a person is likely to meet
in the task of his or her growing.
The Fool is potentially everybody,
but not everybody has the wisdom
or the guts to play the fool.
A lot of folks don't know
what's in that bag they're carrying.
And they're all too willing
to trade it for cash.
Inside the bag, they have
every tool they need
to facilitate their life's journey,
but they won't even
open it up and glance inside.
Subconsciously, the goal
of all of us out-of-control primates
is essentially the same,
but let me assure you of this:
the only ones who'll
ever reach that goal are
the ones who have the courage
to make fools of themselves along the way.
-- Tom Robbins Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas
An Irishman walks into a pub.
The bartender asks him, What'll you have?
The man says, Give me
three pints of Guinness, please.
The bartender brings him three pints and the man proceeds to alternately sip one, then the other, then the third until they're gone. He then orders three more.
The bartender says, Sir, no need to order as many at a time.
I’ll keep an eye on it and when you get low, I'll bring you a fresh one. The man replies, You don't understand. I have two brothers, one in Australia and one in the States. We made a vow to each other that every Saturday night we'd still drink together.
So right now, me brothers have three Guinness stouts too, and we're drinking together.
The bartender thought this a wonderful tradition and every week the man came in and ordered three beers. But one week, he ordered only two.
He slowly drank them, and then ordered two more. The bartender looked at him sadly. Sir, I know your tradition, and, agh, I'd just like to say that I'm sorry for your loss.
The man looked on him strangely before it finally dawned on him. Oh, me brothers are fine - I just quit drinking.
Paul Brady: Nothing But The Same Old Story
The Pogues: Thousands Are Sailing
May those who love us love us.
And those that don't love us,
May God turn their hearts.
And if He doesn't turn their hearts,
May He turn their ankles,
So we'll know them by their limping.
--Irish toast
The earth makes a sound as of sighs and the last drops fall from the emptied cloudless sky. A small boy, stretching out his hands and looking up at the blue sky, asked his mother how such a thing was possible. Fuck off, she said.
--Samuel Beckett
It was
53 years ago
today
that I
took a
gunshot wound
to the chest
and died
on an
operating table.
In solidarity
with bad poets
everywhere,
I proffer
this garbled
and unfinished
offering:
night mares (a ride on the dream horses)/
i almost kissed the mouth of Death
so wan and thin was her ruthless grin
that when she knocked i nearly let her in
brazen her manner and so barren her breath
as she placed her face right next to mine
i could certainly see her dark eyes shine
no word she spoke but pursed her lips
and touched my cheek with icy fingertips
such a wintry woman i remember thinking
then dreamed that i screamed and found myself sinking
deeper and downward into a trance of no waking
curious lady, is it my life loan you're taking?
she said, i do not steal, i just reclaim
and in paying your debt there is no shame
our night mares are saddled, the journey awaits
the black road before us, will you open your gates?
mental prisms and prison, the colors and the chains
no laughter in the hereafter, i offer you the reins
to the horse of forever, a steed as fast as bliss
but first we seal the bargain, i ask you for a kiss
i never married it's true, i said, but still i have a wife
and if only one kiss is left to give
if this lonely minute is the last i live
i plant my kiss on the open lips of Life
i will not kiss the mouth of Death
nor hold my destruction in my own tired arms
though i weary of struggling for ragged breath
and forgetfulness has its haggard charms
i will not hold the hand of harm
nor will i camp on the banks of Lethe
i will thaw myself out by candlelight
i will choose the day and refuse the night
she shook her head gravely, there were no tears
you answer me bravely, but do not think you can win
there are many more doorways, many more years
i remember you now, and you'll see me again
