Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Mad-Eyed from Stating the Obvious

I find myself increasingly incapable of not condensing and abbreviating. I'm not complaining - I'm reading and writing as well as I have in months. This isn't a coincidence, of course, but I know that the better I'm reading and writing the more obscure I become to everyone else; one side-effect of reading and writing well is an increase in what-the-fuckness. Luckily, many are saying what needs to be thought about, which is the selfish reason (besides blegwhoring, wink) I post so many links, to spare me from saying what needs to be said that I don't feel like saying too.

Another side-effect of reading and writing better is an increase in bleggalgazing (though with me, a side-effect of severe reading slumps and writer's blocks is an increase in bleggalgazing). The side-project will continue (or not) - and this will be the last bump here, though it's blegrelled for you to ignore at your pleasure. In the meantime, for your consideration, the awesomest bleggalgazing ever. Fine ironies abound! Maybe I'll write about them (or not). Everything is negotiation, yo.







ADVICE TO A PROPHET


Richard Wilbur

When you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city,
Mad-eyed from stating the obvious,
Not proclaiming our fall but begging us
In God's name to have self-pity,

Spare us all word of the weapons, their force and range,
The long numbers that rocket the mind;
Our slow, unreckoning hearts will be left behind,
Unable to fear what is too strange.

Nor shall you scare us with talk of the death of the race.
How should we dream of this place without us?--
The sun mere fire, the leaves untroubled about us,
A stone look on the stone's face?

Speak of the world's own change. Though we cannot conceive
Of an undreamt thing, we know to our cost
How the dreamt cloud crumbles, the vines are blackened by frost,
How the view alters.  We could believe,

If you told us so, that the white-tailed deer will slip
Into perfect shade, grown perfectly shy,
The lark avoid the reaches of our eye,
The jack-pine lose its knuckled grip

On the cold ledge, and every torrent burn
As Xanthus once, its gliding trout
Stunned in a twinkling.  What should we be without
The dolphin's arc, the dove's return, 

These things in which we have seen ourselves and spoken?
Ask us, prophet, how we shall call
Our natures forth when that live tongue is all
Dispelled, that glass obscured or broken

In which we have said the rose of our love and the clean
Horse of our courage, in which beheld
The singing locust of the soul unshelled,
And all we mean or wish to mean.

Ask us, ask us whether with the worldless rose
Our hearts shall fail us; come demanding
Whether there shall be lofty or long standing
When the bronze annals of the oak-tree close.


11 comments:

  1. I'm a relatively new common tater at BDR, so forgive me for this question:

    What is bleggalgazing?
    ~

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  2. Tom Tomorrow sure knows how to build a SKAAAAAAAWY scawe-kwow... and demolish it! He's so superior!

    A submission, humbly: reading Pwogistan will send every urge of Reason into an impassable briar patch.

    The tendrils are made of Superior Attitude and Negative Judgment.

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  3. PS: "Reason" having an initial capital to denote the quality and thing itself, and not the ridiculous "libertarian" rag/website.

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  4. Thanks for linkinz. I like your title better than mine.

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  5. Charles, please remember I'm still a recovering pwogwessive - I'm a recent apostate. And giving up on the pwofessional left (and most pwoggieblogosphere) doesn't mean I can't still loathe the cracker right. I'm largely small this way.

    And Tom Tomorrow makes me laugh. Just because I have new wounds to scratch doesn't mean I don't like scratching old wounds too.

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  6. Bahm & humbug. I claim bleggalgazing for those of us who consistently post nonrecyclable garbage, not Shakespearean Schubertiads. (it *is* nice a lot of you yokels, & you too, our esteemed host, post about Important Stuff. Much easier to go "me too," heh)

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  7. Just discovered the new joint. Possibilities.

    If I'm not mistaken, I recognize the particular Moleskine from a bright, blustery October afternoon. If I am, it won't be the first time I let my ego intrude on an accurate observation.

    Hoping to get back in teh bleggame soon,
    Jim H.

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  8. Heh, that was filled up and archived by the middle of December.

    New tablet for that project is a Boorum & Pease 21 series columnar book, quad-ruled (five square per inch) 300 pages.

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  9. Lovely. Exchanging the comforts of commonality for the beauty of singularity...

    For too many of us, our essential connection to each other is that we are, largely, the same — or so we almost hope. Same joy, same sadness, same work, same lives. We can't wait to learn that we both knew that same crazy guy, back when we hung at that same place, for the same reason...

    BDR, one man.

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  10. Oh dear. I was off the grid for most of the day, until my arrival here in Duhmurikuh. Thanks for the link to some crap I decided needed to be buried by less unkind crap. Not that I think it answered anyone's questions, since the unkind crap didn't actually link to anyone specifically being told to STFU. Which, of course, provided maximum deniability for all concerned, right?

    Randal, I need to man up and apologize for a slur you didn't know I committed. I'm very very sorry that I called you a fan of a team that you are most emphatically not a fan of. Even if I did it in private and behind your back. It was presumptuous and horrible, and unfathomably wrong, and I am humbled by my error, which only came to light because our host was rightly confused by the utter wrongness of it. I am a really bad person and I apologize.

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  11. Tee Vee, the core of my complicity is wanting it both ways, the core of my aargh is my inability to do so.

    And if you, in Seattle, are Phavid Dillips as in Annie Hawk and know who I am I surrender my soul in full to Serendipity.

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