Fireless and Empty as Any Hat

So much I can't talk about, and especially. It's good, weird as shit but worked through. Of course I thought about me first, but that furnace is emberless. At least this furnace. I'm working on diminishing furnaces' influence. Yes, say furnace, get the Merwin poem below. Which reminds me: but for a few BOOM! poems I can't hear Merwin sing. I blame me. Two weeks ago someone smart put an ember in my furnace telling me to read Merwin again. I did. Still trying, not working. When hiking in Maine vacation we speculated on living in Maine, as in not just the August, September, October glory days but the November through July suck, frozen then muddy and buggy. We agreed we'll rent a test suck year before buying. Most everywhere sucks but peak Autumn. The point being: I never decided I would always live where I've always lived but I've never thought about living anywhere else. When I had to, really had to, for the first time, that furnace pilot-lit and whooshed but fuck that. We will probably live someplace other than where we've lived our whole lives. Learning to kayak, there aren't any mountains there. I'm told there are superior lakes.

• Funny.
• Horse-drawn plough.
• Of which he is almost certain.
• Seeking racial justice in all communities, including Indian Country.
• Pacific Coast Trail = Alt-Right v Appalachian Trail = Commie Hippies? The lack of utilitarian function also made the trails’ ideological purpose more evident. The chief architect of the Pacific Crest Trail, Clinton Clarke, saw the project in explicitly racial and religious terms. The “negro boys” of America, he complained in 1937, had remained “closer to the soil” and so were taking “all the athletic prizes,” while whites suffered from “too much sitting on soft seats in motors, too much sitting in soft seats in movies, and too much lounging in easy chairs before radios.” Only a long trip in the woods by “clean, strong young Christians,” Clarke’s assistant wrote, could “preserve our Christian civilization,” while eradicating communism as well. The great attraction of the new trail, according to a young man who blazed a section, was “the fact that I was one of the first fellows to participate in such a conquest of this kind.” Back east the founder of the Appalachian Trail, Benton MacKaye, was a rather different figure, a supporter of the Soviet Union and a friend of Sinclair Lewis, John Reed, and Lewis Mumford. MacKaye believed his trail would provide a solution to the labor unrest of the period—much of which was led by Wobbly lumberjacks and miners—by offering land and work in government-owned towns, newly built along the trail in the forest; no less a man of his time than Clarke, MacKaye termed his scheme “colonization.”
• Both sides now (and forever).
• Antifascism: pros and cons?
• On the obsolescence of the bourgeois novel in the Anthropocene.
• On the above, sort of.
• A guide to weird Leftist internet slang.
• Sir Viv Stanshall Day.

W.S Merwin

Accosted by Asthmatic Bulldogs

• From the window of the plane ride home from vacation, the library I work in. Functionally it blows, from this angle gorgeous, its cairns. 
• This post's title one of my favorite jokes ever.
• Hillaryite Colleague: Your admit your position has zero chance at majority yet you bitch.
• Me: Would you talk about my position if I didn't?
• Occasional reminder that not only am I complicit - witness who runs my free blogging platform - with fothermucking google - witness who runs my email - I daily self-incriminate myself (in my small ineffectual fashion) via fothermucking google.
• I say to myself, go back to wordpress, go back to typepad, find another blogging platform, then think of the hassles of rebranding.
• I say to myself, go to another email service, and et cet.

• Why are black women expected to save America's soul?
• The extinction event gains momentum.
• Liberalism in and out of time.
• Avedon Carol has lots of links for you.
• xymphora has lots of links for you.
• Our obsession with Trump shows Authoritarianism has already arrived in America.
• I've a draft - Trump is winning, yo. Will win.
• Pee-Wee Goebbels.
• Purity Politics.
• Keep your electric eye on me, babe.
• #715. 
• Rick Nielsen picks his baker's dozen. 

EIGHT VARIATIONS

Weldon Kees

1.

         Prurient tapirs gamboled on our lawns,

         But that was quite some time ago.

         Now one is accosted by asthmatic bulldogs,

         Sluggish in the hedges, ruminant.

     

         Moving through ivy in the park

         Near drying waterfalls, we open every gate;

         But that grave, shell-white unicorn is gone.

         The path is strewn with papers to the street.

    

         Numbers that once were various

         Regarded us, were thought significant, significant

         Enough to bring reporters to the scene.

         But now the bell strikes one, strikes one,

    

         Strikes one—monotonous and tired.

    

         Or clicks like a sad valise.

    2. Note to Be Left on the Table

    This ghost of yours, padding about the upper halls,

    Given to fright-wigs Burbage might have worn,

    Moaning in doorways, jumping out at maids,

    Has not convinced me even yet. Can this be you?

    Your life was frightening enough, but this

    Poor pallid counterpart who fuddles in its role

    Is inexcusable. Go haunt the houses of the girls

    You once infected, or the men who bore

    Your company far oftener than I; annoy the others

    For a change. Is this, my house, the medieval hell

    You took to at the grave’s edge, years ago,

    After a dozen other hells had burned themselves away,

    Or are we purgatory here? If not,

    You make it one. I give you until noon.

3.

Ruined travelers in sad trousseaux

Roost on my doorstep, indolent and worn.

Not one of them fulfills despised Rousseau’s

Predictions. Perhaps they are waiting to be born.

If so, the spot’s been badly chosen.

This is a site for posthumous investigations,

Pillows stuffed with nettles, charnal notions:

Apoplectic executioners, bungled incisions.

Indeed, our solitary midwife fondles the hemlock.

    

We welcomed one poor hackneyed Christ,

Sad bastard, croaking of pestilence. The basement

Holds him now. He has not as yet arisen.

The tickets are ready; the line forms on the right.

Justice and virtue, you will find, have been amazingly preserved.

   

         4.

         As water from a dwindling reservoir

         Uncovers mossy stones, new banks of silt,

         So every minute that I spend with you reveals

         New flaws, new features, new intangibles.

         We have been sitting here for hours—

         “I spent that summer in Madrid,

         The winter on the coast of France—

         The Millotsons were there, and Farnsworth.

         My work has perished with the rest

         Of Europe, gone, all gone. We will not see the end.”

   

         You said goodbye, and your perfume

         Lingered for hours. At first it seemed

         Like summer dying there, then rank and sharp.

  

         And yet I did not air the room.

   

      5.

      Among Victorian beadwork and the smell of plush,

      The owls, stuffed and marvelously sinister,

      Glare from dark corners, waiting for the night.

      High up, the moose’s passive eyes explore

      Candles, unlit, within cut-glass. A door

      Is opened, and you enter with a look

      You might have saved for Pliny or the Pope.

    

      The furniture has shrunk now thirty years

      Have passed (with talent thinning out, and words

      Gone dead), and mouths of friends in photographs

      Display their hopeful and outmoded smiles.

      You counted on at least a sputter of nostalgia,

      However fretful. That was a mistake. Even the moose

      Regards you with a tired, uncomprehending stare.

    

         6.

         Signboards commemorate their resting place.

         The graveless of another century

         Came and were conquered; now their bones

         Are dust where idiot highways run.

         Land in their eyes, unquiet ancestors

         (On fences yellow signs clang in the wind)

         Unstirred by suns drying the brown weeds

         Above them now in parched and caking land.

    

         But when they speak of you, they feel the need

         Of voices polished and revised by history,

         The martial note, words framed in capitals.

    

         It is good to be deaf in a deafening time

         With the sky gone colorless, while the dead

         Thunder breaks, a cracked dish, out of the mind.

    

      7.

      The eye no longer single: where the bowl,

      Dead in the thickened darkness, swelled with light,

      Transformed the images and moved the artist’s hand,

      Becomes a framework for our mania.

   

      And haunts the stairway. Friends depart,

      Taking their last look from the roof,

      Saying goodnight and carrying their view

      Of grapes the model ate in Paris years ago.

   

      Blue in the morning, green some afternoons;

      The night, ambiguous, forgets the signature.

   

      The dust in attics settled and his stove

      Grew cold. About the model nothing much is known.

    

      It ends the wall and complements the view

      Of chimneys. And it hides a stain.

   

         8.

         And when your beauty, washed away

         In impure streams with my desire,

         Is only topic for ill-mannered minds,

         Gifted and glassy with exact recall,

         Gossip and rancid footnotes, or remote despair,

         Let ruined weather perish in the streets

         And let the world’s black lying flag come down.

   

         Only in calendars that mark no Spring

         Can there be weather in the mind

         That moves to you again as you are now:

         Tired after love and silent in this house,

         Your back turned to me, quite alone,

         Standing with one hand raised to smooth your hair,

         At a small window, green with rain.

Islands of Maine Fading

Frog Pond, Baxter State Park, yesterday. We did a short mile and a half out, mile and a half back, then drove the 46 mile park road from south to north. Bought maps, reconnoitered. Conclusions? Our fat asses couldn't be dragged over the big mountains - we'll be ready next year. With lots of Deet. Lots of Deet. That short hike taught us well, and we had Deet.

Two more things confirmed about Maine. The vast nowhere between somewheres exists. The worthiness of crossing that nowhere to get to somewhere is true. Oh, a third: Maine always whispers, careful, I can kill you if you're not wary. I believe it.

I'm sitting in the breakfast lobby of a Comfort Inn in Bangor Maine at 630 in the morning. Earthgirl is still sleeping. We got one of the last rooms available in Bangor yesterday evening. There is a Fitz and the Tantrums concert on Bangor waterfront, IT'S A BIG DEAL. If I remember correctly, Fitz and the Tantrums are a current Hall and Oates rip-off band. Could verify; fuck that. But the breakfast lobby is full of the elderly. I'm elderly - I'll be 58 in three weeks - and I'm the youngest here. I don't think the elderly in the lobby are in Bangor for Fitz and the Tantrums, so there must be a convention of some sort too. So have links.

• Mongo's latest random blogging.
• Scientactically-told truths.
• Madness/Cherries.
• I admit I know little about Kamala Harris (as opposed to knowing much about the deanneeradaouwalshes attacking anyone who criticize Harris), so here, one introduction of sorts.
• Styles of presidential mannishness.
• Race to the bottom.
• Quick note on Venezuela.
• On Chavezism.
• Henri Lefebvre, for those of you who do.
• Maggie's weekly links. 
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• Filling the creative space.
• Is Linguistics a science? Umpteenth time - I wish I'd had an intro Linguistics course decades ago. I might not have been an English major.
• How poetry works. These will be my birthday presents to me.

 

THE BOOK OF THE DEAD

Muriel Rukeyser

These roads will take you into your own country.

Seasons and maps coming where this road comes

into a landscape mirrored in these men.
   

Past all your influences, your home river,

constellations of cities, mottoes of childhood,

parents and easy cures, war, all evasion’s wishes.
   

What one word must never be said?

Dead, and these men fight off our dying,

cough in the theatres of the war.
   

What two things shall never be seen?

They : what we did.     Enemy : what we mean.

This is a nation’s scene and halfway house.
   

What three things can never be done?

Forget.     Keep silent.     Stand alone.

The hills of glass, the fatal brilliant plain.
   

The facts of war forced into actual grace.

Seasons and modern glory.     Told in the histories,

               how first ships came
   

seeing on the Atlantic thirteen clouds

lining the west horizon with their white

               shining halations;
   

they conquered, throwing off impossible Europe—

could not be used to transform; created coast—

               breathed-in America.
   

See how they took the land, made after-life

fresh out of exile, planted the pioneer

               base and blockade,
   

pushed forests down in an implacable walk

west where new clouds lay at the desirable

               body of sunset;
   

taking the seaboard.     Replaced the isolation,

dropped cities where they stood, drew a tidewater

               frontier of Europe,
   

a moment, and another frontier held,

this land was planted home-land that we know.

               Ridge of discovery,
   

until we walk to windows, seeing America

lie in a photograph of power, widened

               before our forehead,
   

and still behind us falls another glory,

London unshaken, the long French road to Spain,

               the old Mediterranean
   

flashing new signals from the hero hills

near Barcelona, monuments and powers,

               parent defenses.
   

Before our face the broad and concrete west,

green ripened field, frontier pushed back like river

               controlled and dammed;
   

the flashing wheatfields, cities, lunar plains

grey in Nevada, the sane fantastic country

               sharp in the south,
   

liveoak, the hanging moss, a world of desert,

the dead, the lava, and the extreme arisen

               fountain of life,
   

the flourished land, people with watercourses

to California and the colored sea;

               sums of frontiers
   

and unmade boundaries of acts and poems,

the brilliant scene between the seas, and standing,

               this fact and this disease.
                       ______________
   

Half-memories absorb us, and our ritual world

carries its history in familiar eyes,

planted in flesh it signifies its music
   

in minds which turn to sleep and memory,

in music knowing all the shimmering names,

the spear, the castle, and the rose.
   

But planted in our flesh these valleys stand,

everywhere we begin to know the illness,

are forced up, and our times confirm us all.
   

In the museum life, centuries of ambition

yielded at last a fertilizing image:

the Carthaginian stone meaning a tall woman
   

carries in her two hands the book and cradled dove,

on her two thighs, wings folded from the waist

cross to her feet, a pointed human crown.
   

This valley is given to us like a glory.

To friends in the old world, and their lifting hands

that call for intercession. Blow falling full in face.
   

All those whose childhood made learn skill to meet,

and art to see after the change of heart;

all the belligerents who know the world.
   

You standing over gorges, surveyors and planners,

you workers and hope of countries, first among powers;

you who give peace and bodily repose,
   

opening landscapes by grace, giving the marvel lowlands

physical peace, flooding old battlefields

with general brilliance, who best love your lives;
   

and you young, you who finishing the poem

wish new perfection and begin to make;

you men of fact, measure our times again.

                    _____________
   

These are our strength, who strike against history.

These whose corrupt cells owe their new styles of weakness

               to our diseases;
   

these carrying light for safety on their foreheads

descended deeper for richer faults of ore,

               drilling their death.
  

These touching radium and the luminous poison,

carried their death on the lips and with their warning

               glow in their graves.
   

These weaves and their eyes water and rust away,

these stand at wheels until their brains corrode,

               these farm and starve,
   

all these men cry their doom across the world,

meeting avoidable death, fight against madness,

               find every war.
   

Are known as strikers, soldiers, pioneers,

fight on all new frontiers, are set in solid

               lines of defense.
   

Defense is sight; widen the lens and see

standing over the land myths of identity,

               new signals, processes:
   

Alloys begin : certain dominant metals.

Deliberate combines add new qualities,

               sums of new uses.
   

Over the country, from islands of Maine fading,

Cape Sable fading south into the orange

               detail of sunset,
   

new processes, new signals, new possession.

A name for all the conquests, prediction of victory

               deep in these powers.
   

Carry abroad the urgent need, the scene,

to photograph and to extend the voice,

               to speak this meaning.
   

Voices to speak to us directly.     As we move.

As we enrich, growing in larger motion,

               this word, this power.
   

Down coasts of taken countries, mastery,

discovery at one hand, and at the other

               frontiers and forests,
   

fanatic cruel legend at our back and

speeding ahead the red and open west,

               and this our region,
   

desire, field, beginning.    Name and road,

communication to these many men,

as epilogue, seeds of unending love.

  

Man in the Cairn

Hadley Brook Trail to Maple Springs Trail to Sargent South Trail to top of Sargent Mountain then Grandgent Trail down off Sargent then up to Gilmore Peak then down off Gilmore then up to Parkman Mountain then Parkman Mountain Trail straight down to car was yesterday. Photos by Earthgirl - the human in the cairn, on ridge, be me.

And that's it for Acadia this year. We need be out of house by ten - we'll be out by seven. We're gonna drive to Baxter State Park and look around - there won't be time to climb Katadhin, but we can gauge what time we need allot next summer when we're here, and we'll find some small hike before sleeping in Bangor Saturday night before flying home Sunday. There are no critical votes in the Senate tonight, even if I see the Senator at airport Sunday, pwfft.

One Is Not Necessarily Discord on Earth

Me climbing the east ascent of Cadillac Mountain yesterday. I used two arms, two legs going up, two arms, two legs, and one ass going down.

Gorge Trail, runs from Loop Road to saddle between Dorr and Cadillac Mountains, is an amazing feat of trail building.

Today our last in Acadia. We're gonna Sargent Mt, Gilmore Peak, and Parkman Mt. Beyond end of vacation blues themselves, it ends just as I'm gaining confidence in my footing on difficult trails - I have poor balance to start, and what eyesight I've lost is at the bottom of my field of vision. Just gaining unconscious knowledge of when to use the left foot instead of the right for this leap, the right instead of the left for this blind lift takes me days. I lost what I learned last year, just felt it coming back yesterday. I've got good wind, I can go forever, my arms and legs are strong, and now that I can do that two foot hoist or slide down that four foot chasm on my ass without thinking twice, we're almost done. I wrote this last year, probably. I'll write this next year, probably.

• That's the view from the porch as I type thisat 530 this morning. It's a non-hurry morning - our hike today has plenty of parking, the week's earlier hikes had limited parking, we were out the door early. Earthgirl's still asleep, here are some links I own you.
• fish? This is why I keep a blugrall called Moribund.
• Floating Ghosts.
• Tactically-told truths.
• Quick! (since the 2020 Democratic POTUS primary season is on) - Why Leftists don't trust Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Deval Patrick. Why Leftists HATE! the corporate Democrats promoting them. 
• Reminder re: the above. Also, also too.

• Hate is the new sex.
• Stuck in Rural America.
• How he got barred from posting on twitter (not me).
• Something genuinely good the internet has allowed (and is illegal).
• Clouds.
• Why can't he be like Endicott? Not for the earworm, for the story.
• Organize your bookshelf randomly so you find things you didn't know you were looking for while looking for something else.
• Arthur says he's writing, still needs the coins in your pocket.
• Stream Dischord's catalog for free.

ON THE MOVE

Thom Gunn

The blue jay scuffling in the bushes follows

Some hidden purpose, and the gust of birds

That spurts across the field, the wheeling swallows,

Has nested in the trees and undergrowth.

Seeking their instinct, or their poise, or both,

One moves with an uncertain violence

Under the dust thrown by a baffled sense

Or the dull thunder of approximate words.

 

On motorcycles, up the road, they come:

Small, black, as flies hanging in heat, the Boys,

Until the distance throws them forth, their hum

Bulges to thunder held by calf and thigh.

In goggles, donned impersonality,

In gleaming jackets trophied with the dust,

They strap in doubt – by hiding it, robust –

And almost hear a meaning in their noise.

 

Exact conclusion of their hardiness

Has no shape yet, but from known whereabouts

They ride, direction where the tyres press.

They scare a flight of birds across the field:

Much that is natural, to the will must yield.

Men manufacture both machine and soul,

And use what they imperfectly control

To dare a future from the taken routes.

 

It is a part solution, after all.

One is not necessarily discord

On earth; or damned because, half animal,

One lacks direct instinct, because one wakes

Afloat on movement that divides and breaks.

One joins the movement in a valueless world,

Choosing it, till, both hurler and the hurled,

One moves as well, always toward, toward.

 

A minute holds them, who have come to go:

The self-defined, astride the created will

They burst away; the towns they travel through

Are home for neither bird nor holiness,

For birds and saints complete their purposes.

At worst, one is in motion; and at best,

Reaching no absolute, in which to rest,

One is always nearer by not keeping still.

To Be Quiet in Another Throat

OK, yesterday was Easy Day, seven miles around Holbrook Island Sanctuary. I'd seen signs for it on the way to Isle au Haut, so we checked it out, guessed right it wouldn't be Acadia rigorous. All photos, this time, by me.

Red blazed trails are rare. Appalachian Trail is of course white-blazed, but the vast majority of trails (including Acadia's) are blazed baby blue. Perhaps baby blue hits the eyes' rods and cones brighter, and it seems to need less maintenance than other colors for reasons I can't explain, I think it's love, when I say to you that I feel blue.

• When was the last time someone threw a Who allusion at you?
• Saw NOBODY! for the three hours we hiked. NOBODY!
• Was exactly what our bodies needed - no day off, no hard hike. Work, not WORK.
• Today, Gorge Trail to saddle between Cadillac and Dorr, up Cadillac first, then down and then up Dorr, then down. Hardest of the trip.
• The owner came down to house to say hi last night as I was cooking dinner - they live in the carriage barn on the property, and promised us these weeks next year, so yay.
• I like The Who. Enough to have owned records. Youngsters, they were big once.
• In honor of an easy day for my old knees, a blog day off for my old barks.
• True fact: I cook, Earthgirl does dishes.

SANCTUARY

Jean Valentine

People pray to each other. The way I say "you" to someone else,
respectfully, intimately, desperately. The way someone says
"you" to me, hopefully, expectantly, intensely ...
—Huub Oosterhuis 

You       who I don’t know       I don’t know how to talk to you   

 

—What is it like for you there?

 

Here ... well, wanting solitude; and talk; friendship—

The uses of solitude. To imagine; to hear.

Learning braille. To imagine other solitudes.

But they will not be mine;

to wait, in the quiet; not to scatter the voices—

 

What are you afraid of?

 

What will happen. All this leaving. And meetings, yes. But death.   

What happens when you die?

 

“... not scatter the voices,”

Drown out. Not make a house, out of my own words. To be quiet in   

another throat; other eyes; listen for what it is like there. What   

word. What silence. Allowing. Uncertain: to drift, in the

restlessness ... Repose. To run like water—

 

What is it like there, right now?

 

Listen: the crowding of the street; the room. Everyone hunches in   

against the crowding; holding their breath: against dread.

 

What do you dread?

 

What happens when you die?

 

What do you dread, in this room, now?

 

Not listening. Now. Not watching. Safe inside my own skin.

To die, not having listened. Not having asked ... To have scattered   

life.

 

Yes I know: the thread you have to keep finding, over again, to   

follow it back to life; I know. Impossible, sometimes.

They Are Preparing to Being Again

Yesterday was supposed to be Easy Day. After four days of hard

1. Friday - Schoodic Head
2. Saturday - Champlain Mountain
3. Sunday - Acadia and St Sauveur Mountains
4. Monday - Penobscot Mountain

we decided we're old, lets take an easy day, let's take the passenger ferry to Ilse du Haut, a remote section of Acadia National Park, sixty miles from Mount Desert Island, for leisurely coast walking. Nope. There is no easy in Acadia.

• It doesn't help that we look at the menu of hikes and decide we must finish with the one designated Difficult. It's a small island, it's only a 400 foot ascent, how hard can it be? 
• Hardest 400 feet up yet. They don't use iron rungs and wooden ladders on Isle du Haut.
• It's not the up that hurts, it's the down.
• The Susan Collins Effect is over, yo. Hello beloveds, friends analog and digital, and welcome to few new of you still here.
• Here's the bridge over Penobscot Bay straits between mainland USA and Deer Island on the way to Stonington where we caught the ferry. All photos today by Earthgirl.

• James Baldwin's Beginning or the End of America for his 93rd birthday.
• Forgive me, last night on twaater I gave into anger: one knows when the Hillarium senses Trump is in danger, there's an election to be won: it attacks anyone who criticizes Clintonian neoliberalism (or any of their human trial balloons being floated) from the Left as racist, sexist asshole white men. I barked.
• Also too.
• I think the twaater peak via the Collins tweet was 715 followers yesterday evening before the events of the next bullet.
• Twaater Tip: to reduce followers, type I. Hate. Motherfucking. Democrats.* Since that tweet last night, I'm down to 653. Be interesting to see how many unfollow during today's hike.
• *True.

• Late, sorry: Maggie's weekly links.
• Late, sorry: { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• Reminder: xymphora does daily links.
• There is a new Deux Filles album and I just bought it.
• Rachel Cusk gut-renovates the novel? I liked - really liked - Outline, but didn't think it did anything particularly new.
• Dan's recent literary criticism.
• Last Ashbery for his birthday poem until next year.
• Up to song 499 on the iPod in alphabetical order by song title, we're still in A. I don't think we'll make it to D on this trip, maybe even C.

THE TASK

John Ashbery

They are preparing to begin again:
Problems, new pennant up the flagpole
In a predicated romance.

About the time the sun begins to cut laterally across
The western hemisphere with its shadows, its carnival echoes,
The fugitive lands crowd under separate names.
It is the blankness that follows gaiety, and Everyman must depart
Out there into stranded night, for his destiny
Is to return unfruitful out of the lightness
That passing time evokes. It was only
Cloud-castles, adept to seize the past
And possess it, through hurting. And the way is clear
Now for linear acting into that time
In whose corrosive mass he first discovered how to breathe.

Just look at the filth you’ve made,
See what you’ve done.
Yet if these are regrets they stir only lightly
The children playing after supper,
Promise of the pillow and so much in the night to come.
I plan to stay here a little while
For these are moments only, moments of insight,
And there are reaches to be attained,
A last level of anxiety that melts
In becoming, like miles under the pilgrim’s feet.

I Know If I Find You I Will Have to Stay with the Earth

The tweet about Susan Collins in the Bangor Airport, Friday July 28, 2017: 859 replies, 14K retweets, 57K likes.

The Kate Bush birthday post tweet, Sunday July 30, 2017: One reply, one retweet, two likes.







Photoshop of me escaping down Schoodic Head by dear friend davidly (most of his posts are in English, but he lives in Berlin so Deutsch sometimes at top of his blog, like now) on Saturday, the selfie at top yesterday, Valley Cove Creek in the saddle between Acadia Mountain and St Sauveur Mountain, Acadia National Park, Maine.

Earthgirl asks I again give her credit, and I do because due. I would have said No to ABC, so NBC wouldn't have asked and NPR wouldn't have used it and I wouldn't have made someone's aggregating post on Lawyers Guns and Money Mike's blog aggregation at Crooks and Liars, and I wouldn't have 221 more twitter followers today than I did Friday morning. I find it fascinating - more than a decade ago Duncan gave me a bump on Eschaton, the only time this shitty blog got any attention out of the ordinary of beloveds and friends analog and digital, but nothing like this: the odds that a flight Earthgirl booked last August would include a pivotal figure in an unfolding American political drama are.... what?

I post the comparison stats solely for my amusement. The odds that there would be a Kate Bush birthday post on July 30th were 100%, as are the odds I'd mention that yesterday was also William Gass' birthday and the odds there will be lots of Grateful Dead songs here tomorrow for Jerry Garcia's birthday. ABC, NBC, NPR, and Crook and Liars will not be covering, nor should they.

Also this: I'm on vacation, so this blog isn't going to do what it does when I'm not on vacation, bark-wise, link-wise, wise-wise. I'll do the Egoslavian Holy Days, of course, and bark if anything barkworthy arises, but at a time when more new eyes are on the blog than ever before and - odds are - ever again, I won't be doing daily aargh-farming this coming week like I do most days except when I'm on vacation. Here's a gag I use all the time, welcome Newcomers: Fine metaphors abound.

Kidding: by Wednesday, only beloveds and friends analog and digital will be here. Meanwhile, yesterday in a bakery getting coffee in Southwest Harbor Maine, we had to make a choice. Beloveds - and one was one of the choices - and friends analog and digital know who we chose:

Photos from woods, songs and poems, will continue through vacation, as is tradition. Newcomers: music play loud, read poems out loud.







HYMN

A.R. Ammons

I know if I find you I will have to leave the earth

and go on out

     over the sea marshes and the brant in bays

and over the hills of tall hickory

and over the crater lakes and canyons

and on up through the spheres of diminishing air

past the blackset noctilucent clouds

           where one wants to stop and look

way past all the light diffusions and bombardments

up farther than the loss of sight

    into the unseasonal undifferentiated empty stark

     

And I know if I find you I will have to stay with the earth

inspecting with thin tools and ground eyes

trusting the microvilli sporangia and simplest

     coelenterates

and praying for a nerve cell

with all the soul of my chemical reactions

and going right on down where the eye sees only traces

     

You are everywhere partial and entire

You are on the inside of everything and on the outside

   

I walk down the path down the hill where the sweetgum

has begun to ooze spring sap at the cut

and I see how the bark cracks and winds like no other bark

chasmal to my ant-soul running up and down

and if I find you I must go out deep into your

    far resolutions

and if I find you I must stay here with the separate leaves

Split Him Open with Devotion, or: Fifty-Nine Today

The traditional High Egoslavian Holy Day post:
  
Hounds of Love has to be one of my three most listened to albums, and the song cycle of side two (back in the days of album sides, youngsters) unquestionably the one side of music I've listened to more than any other:

• Dream of Sheep and 
• Under Ice and  
• Waking the Witch and  
• Watching You Without Me and  
• Jig of Life and  
• Hello Earth and finishing with, and 

you must listen in order like I just did for full kaboom, holyfuck, I love this song:







The line between loving the music and loving the memories the music evokes (and there are ten formative years and three exceptional women - one of whom I'm still married to) when Kate Bush was on the daily soundtrack has long blurred, but she is (has been for decades, since I first heard that voice) one of two permanent members in My Sillyass Desert Island Five Game for both reasons. Lordy, the rush when I first here her voice again after not hearing it for a week. Yes, I post this same post every year.

Requests at my solicitation over the yearsfrom friends davidly, David, symptomatic & K. Thanks. CLICK for LOTS more songs (my apologies if the youtubes have died).




   
*

 

More below the fold.

To All Events I Squirted You

We flew American Airlines Flight 4370 out of National yesterday morning to Bangor Maine. So did Republican Senator Susan Collins, one of three Republicans who voted against abandoning Obamacare the night before.  I didn't see her on the plane - since I first saw her on the ramp from plane to airport I assume she was in a seat ahead of us. When I first passed her - she was waiting on the ramp for somebody - I recognized that she was someone, but who didn't register. It was only when I heard what must have been one of her aides say, at the top of the ramp, how's the Senator, that I got it, and then, when she appeared out of the ramp most of the people in the waiting room applauded and thanked her. I took the photo and tweeted it to my, at that time, 410 followers.

At 2:20 I get an email:

Hi,

I’m a producer with ABC News in New York. I saw the photo you posted to Twitter of Susan Collins getting a round of applause at Bangor Airport this morning.

Did you take this photo? https://twitter.com/BLCKDGRD/status/890966576811388929

If so, can we use it on all ABC platforms and partners with credit to your Twitter account?

Feel free to contact me if  you have any questions.

Fergal Gallagher / ABCNews / Producer Multimedia Newsgathering

I told Earthgirl, and she said are you going to let them use it? and I said, No, of course not, and she said Why? and pleaded with me to let them. OK.

At 5:24 I get an email:

Hello, 

I work for NBC News and saw your photo of Sen. Collins coming out of the airport in Maine: https://twitter.com/BLCKDGRD/status/890966576811388929

Wondering if you took that photo and if so, may we use it across our nbcu partners and platforms? 

Thank you, 

Erin Calabrese

Reporter

NBC News

I told Earthgirl, and she said are you going to let them use it? and I said, No, of course not, and she said Why? and pleaded with me to let them. OK.

As I type this, the tweet has gotten 652 replies, 11K retweets, 43K likes. I've gained 156 followers.

Reminder: why we're in Maine:

• Schoodic Head Trail, Schoodic Penisula.
• Most of the replies are very positive towards Collins for her vote and to me for my photo, and the underlying assumption is that I posted it in support of Collins.
• I confess I am small: anything that makes Mitch McFuckface unhappy makes me happy, but the sole purpose of the tweet was, Hey, this is weird, look at this, one of the three people most in the news was on the same plane as me on the day that person is, was, and will be most famous.
• I didn't know Senators flew commercial.  I suppose had I thought about I'd have guessed they didn't all get private Leer rides whenever they need.
• I didn't know Senators flew without bodyguards. I mean, maybe she did. 
• Earthgirl has pictures of cairns. I will start daily cairning you tomorrow. 
• Earthgirl below, I'm the blue blur beneath the Ashbery.
• Also tomorrow - a return to more regular programming. I'm curious how fast the 156 unfollow.

BUNCH OF STUFF

John Ashbery

To all events I squirted you

knowing this not to be this came to pass

when we were out and it looked good.

Why wouldn’t you want a fresh piece

of outlook to stand in down the years?

See, your house, a former human energy construction,

crashed with us for a few days in May

and sure enough, the polar inscape

brought about some easier poems,

which I guessed was a good thing. At least

some of us were relaxed, Steamboat Bill included.

  

He didn’t drink nothing.

It was one thing

to be ready for their challenge, quite another to accept it.

And if I had a piece of advice for you, this is it:

Poke fun at balm, then suffer lethargy

to irradiate its shallow flood in the new packaging

our enemies processed. They should know.

  

The Gold Dust Twins never stopped supplicating Hoosiers

to limn the trail. There’s no Shakespeare.

Through the window, Casanova.

Couldn’t get to sleep in the dumb incident

of those days, crimping the frozen feet of Lincoln.

UPDATE!

Thanks to @davidly !