US Poetry 1966

The best of times and the worst of times.

Now Science with its right hand unveils the more and more delicate machineries of life just before (or after) its left hand destroys them. The same ravaging giant who threatens to demolish it utterly on earth is the only creature who can comprehend and glorify Creation… but no, we'd better not allow ourselves even that little egoism. Doesn't the crane whoop in celebration, the honker honk in celebration, the otter dive and slide in celebration, the coyote bark in celebration, the buffalo paw and grunt in celebration? We aim a black box and scratch on beaten wood pulp.

A man will never know again.
Thinking we won, we were the only losers.

Man always kills the thing he loves...

We must look funny to Someone,
Tumbling through the universe locked in a death grip with
our tiny ball Earth and ripping her busily to pieces,
trailing a stinking film of gas and pieces of satellites
and mushroom and dust clouds.

The weed will win in the end, of course,

Time is on our side, boys, time is on our side.

Thine alabaster towns will tumble, thine engines rot to dust.
Man will break his date with the future,
No matter how long he wants to play outlaw, no
matter how long he wants to gallop through
town shooting like a madman and hooting
at the laws of nature's god.
It is not they that he has made obsolete, it is
himself.

This knowledge is called wisdom

----

The Song of Finis

At the end of All the Ages
A Knight sate on his steed,
His armour red and thin with rust
His soul from sorrow freed;

And he lifted up his visor
From a face of skin and bone,
And his horse turned head and whinnied
As the twain stood there alone.

No bird above that steep of time
Sang of a livelong quest;
No wind breathed,

Rest:

"Lone for an end!" cried Knight to steed,
Loosed an eager rein--
Charged with his challenge into space:
And quiet did quiet remain.

Walter De La Mare

---

So man is not what he appears.
I had been blind a thousand years.

Wisdom older than the seers,
Beauty much to deep for tears,
And holy silence bursts the ears.

Ssh. The music of the spheres.

---

All passages taken from:

"On the Loose"

Sierra Club, 1966

Comments

360 Degrees - Division in Time and Space

360 Degrees The partitioning of time and space into 360 steps Partitioning a whole into 360 degrees / 60 minutes with a compass and a ruler as universal instruments for the division of space and time The partitioning of a full circle as a representative of the whole into 360 degrees goes back to Babylonian times of farming and simple technology - 5000 years ago, around 3000 BC to 300 BC. Our current decimal number system is based on the number 10; their numerical system was based on the number 60 . In those days, the emphasis was not , as it is today, on arbitrarily precise mathematics, but on those principally so; it was not about calculations ( these were then neither possible nor needed ), but about division and construction of artifacts with available aids . Within simple life, symmetry, dividing evenly, and fair and correct sharing, are of big, if not existential importance. Since reality itself is but an approximation on the mathematically correc

German humor

😀 Rough and politically wrong. In a fake TV documentary many years ago, some faked 'Citizens of Poland' in very loud clothes 'claimed' that their deceased uncle had authored every pop song of the last century, and proceeded to prove this by playing them with tubas and other very loud instruments - making every one sound like a polka. The whole extended family joins in, ' Seductive Sis ' sings while her pay-by-call phone number is displayed on the screen, and so on. "Having stolen their electricity" (another bad cliche, if anything, we're stealing theirs), they are 'forced' to turn the volume down to a whisper from their side so as not to attract too much attention, thereby forcing everyone watching the show to turn up their own TV sets to *full volume* so as to even hear anything - knowing full well they would suddenly turn it up again at the other end, but not WHEN... After lulling the audience by drawing it into the nati

Economics, Science, and Religion 2

[2] previous / next slide In 1859 , Charles Darwin published his observations on the origin of species , which introduced the concept of evolution into the social discussion: not only in the field of biology , but, as a side effect, in geology as well; the world was no longer static , a completed creation, but a dynamic one, constantly evolving; or at least it had been in the past . However, Creation itself was still in some way considered to be complete and static , at least as far as it was projected into the future ; meaning that evolution may have been the way things had developed up to the present , but no further ; the question why this should be so was carefully avoided. This is just one of the many unsolved paradoxes and mysteries resulting from the incomplete implementation of the discoveries made during the era of industrialization: If the world and its human inhabitants are the result of an evolutionary process, then that process is ongoing

Thermo-Dynamic Society

Search This Blog

counting