Without Lifting A Finger

Well, I believe this to be the Solitary Sandpiper @ the El Dorado Park Duck Pond in Long Beach CA. If so: Lifer. If not: You'll tell me.;) A bit tricky to ID because he's got some other near-look-alikes stopping in too (also looking very "solitary"): the spotless Spotted Sandpiper and the Greater Yellowlegs. (Hope you have your shopping finished and can now lean back in your easychair and read a good book.) Happy Holidays!!! 🎄💗🎄💗 #rlswihart #longbeachca #eldoradopark #duckpond #sandpipersofinstagram #solitarysandpiper #ilovesandpipers #christmas2024💗🎄💗🎄 #nature #poetry #beauty #readmorepoetry2024♥️ #thebigclockisticking

New poem in storySouth (Issue 58: Fall 2024): "Another Good Read." Thanks, Story, for including me.;)♥️ http://storysouth.com/stories/another-good-read/ #rlswihart #storySouth #poetryisthething #poetry #AnotherGoodRead #tistheseason #readmorepoetry2024♥️🎄♥️🎄

“That’s like what I meant,” Smith hastened his drawl. “He really asks the questions about King. They’re his questions, but he kept himself out of the poem as much as he could.”  His questions. Did he? The professor as he opened the book felt that all things were possible, and seeing the flower passage he imagined a rustling, as if his metaphor were true, and under the passage moved the animal, the massive insight of the grieving poet. “Yet the flowers are to satisfy himself, not King. Of course, the whole elegy is in King’s honour, but I mean their pathos is less than their beauty. The melancholy is all Milton’s. Listen.  Bid amaranthus all his beauty shed, And daffadillies fill their cups with tears, To strew the laureate hearse where Lycid lies. For so, to interpose a little ease, Let our frail thought …”  At this point, an extraordinary thing happened. The professor saw the word “false” coming. FALSE. He felt as if snatched up by the throat and wrung. “False” threw its...

The maturing John Milton, tending toward his mature works, is very serious:;) As in the invocation of the ‘heavenly Muse’ in the ‘Nativity Ode’, where the poet calls for his mouth to be touched by ‘hallowed fire’ from the angelic altar (line 28), Milton presents himself as a type of Isaiah, whose prophetic speech is released by a fiery coal placed against his lips by the one of the seraphim (Isaiah 6: 6–7). Milton’s lips are purified by holy fire but the ‘Vulgar Amorist’, whose desire is directed towards the body, is unable to control his physical discharges and so is implicitly feminized in terms of contemporary stereotypes of woman as ‘leaky vessel’.

First sentence: Long after the professor had come to doubt whether lives held crucial points as often as the men conducting them or undergoing them imagined, he still considered that one day in early spring had made a difference for him.

YET once more, O ye laurels, and once more,  Ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sere,  I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude,  And with forced fingers rude  Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year.  Bitter constraint and sad occasion dear  Compels me to disturb your season due;  For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime,  Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer.  Who would not sing for Lycidas? he knew  Himself to sing, and build the lofty rhyme.  He must not float upon his watery bier  Unwept, and welter to the parching wind,  Without the meed of some melodious tear.  Begin, then, Sisters of the sacred well  That from beneath the seat of Jove doth spring;  Begin, and somewhat loudly sweep the string.  Hence with denial vain and coy excuse:  So may some gentle Muse  With lucky words favour my destined urn,  And as he passes turn,  And bid fair peace be to my sable shroud!...

What in me is dark Illumine, what is low raise and support; That to the highth of this great Argument I may assert th' Eternal Providence, And justifie the wayes of God to men.

 

The various poetic experiments and student exercises that Milton chose to preserve from his time at school and at Cambridge exhibit such an accelerated pursuit of the humanist ideal of the complete orator–poet. Milton’s character and career, as a writer of both poetry and prose, were profoundly influenced by the educational and cultural ideals of humanitas, in which he was intensively trained by private tutors and then at grammar school and university. Milton exemplifies the success of a humanist programme that sought to instil in students an ‘emotional commitment to antiquity and its repository of useful knowledge, which illuminated the human condition and guided behaviour’.29 The following chapters will show how the pursuit of humanist erudition was a key concern of his life up to the point in 1639 when, aged thirty, he returned from a fourteen-month tour of Italy to an England sliding into civil war. His dedication to the cause of liberty after 1640 was motivated less by ‘benevolenc...

We had spent a long day together, and it had seemed to me short. We had promised one another that we would think the same thoughts and that our two souls should become one soul; a dream which is not original, after all, except that, dreamed by all men, it has been realised by none.

"The great misfortune of not being able to be alone," La Bruyere says somewhere, as though to shame those who rush to forget themselves in the crowd, fearing, doubtless, that they will be unable to endure themselves. "Almost all our ills come to us from inability to remain in our room," said another sage, Pascal, I believe, recalling thus in the cell of meditation the frantic ones who seek happiness in animation, and in a prostitution which I could call fraternary, if I wished to use the fine language of my century.

From The Plaything of the Poor: I should like to give you an idea for an innocent diversion. There are so few amusements that are not guilty ones! When you go out in the morning for a stroll along the highways, fill your pockets with little penny contrivances—such as the straight merryandrew moved by a single thread, the blacksmiths who strike the anvil, the rider and his horse, with a whistle for a tail—and, along the taverns, at the foot of the trees, make presents of them to the unknown poor children whom you meet. You will see their eyes grow beyond all measure. At first, they will not dare to take; they will doubt their good fortune. Then their hands will eagerly seize the gift, and they will flee as do the cats who go far off to eat the bit you have given them, having learned to distrust man.

From Crowds: Multitude, solitude: equal terms mutually convertible by the active and begetting poet. He who does not know how to people his solitude, does not know either how to be alone in a busy crowd. The poet enjoys this incomparable privilege, to be at once himself and others. Like those wandering souls that go about seeking bodies, he enters at will the personality of every man. For him alone, every place is vacant; and if certain places seem to be closed against him, that is because in his eyes they are not worth the trouble of visiting.

 I. My Thatched Cottage  In autumn the thrushes would come to rest there, drawn by the berries of a vivid redness harvested from the service tree of the bird-catchers. The Baron R. Monthermé.  Lifting her eyes afterwards, the good old woman observed how the dry cold north wind was tossing the trees, and was dispersing the traces of the crows that hopped over the snow surrounding the barn. The German poet Voss, Idyll XIII.  My thatched cottage will have, in the summer, the leafage of the woodland for a parasol, and in the autumn, for a garden, at the window’s edge, a patch of moss that will enshrine the pearls of the rainfall, and some wallflower that smells like the almond. But in the winter, what a pleasure, when the morning will have discarded its bouquets of hoarfrost on my frozen windows, to perceive quite far off, on the outskirts of the forest, a traveler who continues to diminish, him and his mount, in the snow and the haze!  What a pleasure, in the eveni...

Two new poems -- "Heretic" & "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" (see teaser) -- are in the latest In Parentheses. Trouble is: it costs. But there's a lot to love, and the digital version is less than $5. Check it out! #rlswihart #InParentheses #Heretic #GoodbyeYellowBrickRoad #poetry #readmorepoetry2024❤️🎈

My dear children, perhaps you won't understand what I am saying to you, because I often speak very unintelligibly, but you'll remember all the same and will agree with my words some time. You must know that there is nothing higher and stronger and more wholesome and good for life in the future than some good memory, especially a memory of childhood, of home. People talk to you a great deal about your education, but some good, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education. If a man carries many such memories with him into life, he is safe to the end of his days, and if one has only one good memory left in one's heart, even that may sometime be the means of saving us. 

"I am like the peasant girl, your excellency... you know. How does it go? 'I'll stand up if I like, and I won't if I don't.' They were trying to put on her sarafan to take her to church to be married, and she said, 'I'll stand up if I like, and I won't if I don't.'... It's in some book about the peasantry." "What do you mean by that?" the President asked severely. "Why, this," Ivan suddenly pulled out a roll of notes. "Here's the money... the notes that lay in that envelope" (he nodded towards the table on which lay the material evidence), "for the sake of which our father was murdered. Where shall I put them? Mr. Superintendent, take them." The usher of the court took the whole roll and handed it to the President. "How could this money have come into your possession if it is the same money?" the President asked wonderingly. "I got them from Smerdyakov, from the murderer, ye...

Thick-billed Kingbird in Ontario CA. I had the traffic about right, but next time (perhaps next week) I'll try to better gauge my time with the beautiful and faithful Mr Squeak by the whims of Phoebus in October (he was breaking through the haze when I left), i.e., I could've used more sun.;) I'll gladly redo that trip to spend another hour or two with Mr Squeak, solace broken only by the occasional mower or weedeater. Thanks just.birdies for the spot-on location. He owns that tree.❤️🎈 P.s. Not only in the very so-so video clip I've posted in Stories, but in a second one (also "just hangable," so eventually I'll hang it too), Mr Squeak loves to scrape his Durante-like schnoz on a tree branch. #rlswihart #ontarioca #hazydays #october #mrsqueak #kingbirdsofinstagram #thickbilledkingbird #humpday #nature #beauty #faithful #poetry #readmorepoetry2024🎈❤️

And so he was sitting almost conscious himself of his delirium and, as I have said already, looking persistently at some object on the sofa against the opposite wall. Someone appeared to be sitting there, though goodness knows how he had come in, for he had not been in the room when Ivan came into it, on his return from Smerdyakov. This was a person or, more accurately speaking, a Russian gentleman of a particular kind, no longer young, qui faisait la cinquantaine[1], as the French say, with rather long, still thick, dark hair, slightly streaked with grey and a small pointed beard. He was wearing a brownish reefer jacket, rather shabby, evidently made by a good tailor though, and of a fashion at least three years old, that had been discarded by smart and well-to-do people for the last two years. His linen and his long scarf-like neck-tie were all such as are worn by people who aim at being stylish, but on closer inspection his linen was not overclean and his wide scarf was very threadb...

 

Ivan did not go home, but went straight to Katerina Ivanovna and alarmed her by his appearance. He was like a madman. He repeated all his conversation with Smerdyakov, every syllable of it. He couldn't be calmed, however much she tried to soothe him: he kept walking about the room, speaking strangely, disconnectedly. At last he sat down, put his elbows on the table, leaned his head on his hands and pronounced this strange sentence: "If it's not Dmitri, but Smerdyakov who's the murderer, I share his guilt, for I put him up to it. Whether I did, I don't know yet. But if he is the murderer, and not Dmitri, then, of course, I am the murderer, too."

"Doctor... your Excellency... and will it be soon, soon?" "You must be prepared for anything," said the doctor in emphatic and incisive tones, and dropping his eyes, he was about to step out to the coach. "Your Excellency, for Christ's sake!" the terror-stricken captain stopped him again. "Your Excellency! But can nothing, absolutely nothing save him now?" "It's not in my hands now," said the doctor impatiently, "but h'm!..." he stopped suddenly. "If you could, for instance... send... your patient... at once, without delay" (the words "at once, without delay," the doctor uttered with an almost wrathful sternness that made the captain start) "to Syracuse, the change to the new be-ne-ficial "To Syracuse!" cried the captain, unable to grasp what was said. "Syracuse is in Sicily," Kolya jerked out suddenly in explanation. The doctor looked at him. "Sicily! Your Excellen...

 

A new poem, "Sometimes," has been published in the October 2024 issue of Quadrant Magazine. Surprise Surprise: it's about a little bird. You should be able to read the whole poem at the following link: https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/poetry/rl-swihart-sometimes/ #rlswihart13 #rlswihart #sometimes #poetry #art #littlebirds #quadrantmagazine #readmorepoetry2024🎈♥️🪶

He did not stop on the steps either, but went quickly down; his soul, overflowing with rapture, yearned for freedom, space, openness. The vault of heaven, full of soft, shining stars, stretched vast and fathomless above him. The Milky Way ran in two pale streams from the zenith to the horizon. The fresh, motionless, still night enfolded the earth. The white towers and golden domes of the cathedral gleamed out against the sapphire sky. The gorgeous autumn flowers, in the beds round the house, were slumbering till morning. The silence of earth seemed to melt into the silence of the heavens. The mystery of earth was one with the mystery of the stars.... Alyosha stood, gazed, and suddenly threw himself down on the earth. He did not know why he embraced it. He could not have told why he longed so irresistibly to kiss it, to kiss it all. But he kissed it weeping, sobbing, and watering it with his tears, and vowed passionately to love it, to love it for ever and ever. "Water the earth wi...

"You see, Alyosha," Grushenka turned to him with a nervous laugh. "I was boasting when I told Rakitin I had given away an onion, but it's not to boast I tell you about it. It's only a story, but it's a nice story. I used to hear it when I was a child from Matryona, my cook, who is still with me. It's like this. Once upon a time there was a peasant woman and a very wicked woman she was. And she died and did not leave a single good deed behind. The devils caught her and plunged her into the lake of fire. So her guardian angel stood and wondered what good deed of hers he could remember to tell to God; 'She once pulled up an onion in her garden,' said he, 'and gave it to a beggar woman.' And God answered: 'You take that onion then, hold it out to her in the lake, and let her take hold and be pulled out. And if you can pull her out of the lake, let her come to Paradise, but if the onion breaks, then the woman must stay where she is.' Th...

That is my view of the monk, and is it false? Is it too proud? Look at the worldly and all who set themselves up above the people of God; has not God's image and His truth been distorted in them? They have science; but in science there is nothing but what is the object of sense. The spiritual world, the higher part of man's being is rejected altogether, dismissed with a sort of triumph, even with hatred. The world has proclaimed the reign of freedom, especially of late, but what do we see in this freedom of theirs? Nothing but slavery and self-destruction! For the world says: "You have desires and so satisfy them, for you have the same rights as the most rich and powerful. Don't be afraid of satisfying them and even multiply your desires." That is the modern doctrine of the world. In that they see freedom. And what follows from this right of multiplication of desires? In the rich, isolation and spiritual suicide; in the poor, envy and murder; for they have been gi...

But everything and all our fates are from the Lord. 'Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.' Remember that. You, Alexey, I've many times silently blessed for your face, know that," added the elder with a gentle smile. "This is what I think of you, you will go forth from these walls, but will live like a monk in the world. You will have many enemies, but even your foes will love you. Life will bring you many misfortunes, but you will find your happiness in them, and will bless life and will make others bless it- which is what matters most. Well, that is your character. Fathers and teachers," he addressed his friends with a tender smile, "I have never till to-day told even him why the face of this youth is so dear to me. Now I will tell you. His face has been as it were a remembrance and a prophecy for me. At the dawn of my life when I was a child I had an elder brother who died b...

What do I care for a hell for oppressors? What good can hell do, since those children have already been tortured? And what becomes of harmony, if there is hell? I want to forgive. I want to embrace. I don't want more suffering. And if the sufferings of children go to swell the sum of sufferings which was necessary to pay for truth, then I protest that the truth is not worth such a price. I don't want the mother to embrace the oppressor who threw her son to the dogs! She dare not forgive him! Let her forgive him for herself, if she will, let her forgive the torturer for the immeasurable suffering of her mother's heart. But the sufferings of her tortured child she has no right to forgive; she dare not forgive the torturer, even if the child were to forgive him! And if that is so, if they dare not forgive, what becomes of harmony? Is there in the whole world a being who would have the right to forgive and could forgive? I don't want harmony. From love for humanity I don...

But you must note this: if God exists and if He really did create the world, then, as we all know, He created it according to the geometry of Euclid and the human mind with the conception of only three dimensions in space. Yet there have been and still are geometricians and philosophers, and even some of the most distinguished, who doubt whether the whole universe, or to speak more widely, the whole of being, was only created in Euclid's geometry; they even dare to dream that two parallel lines, which according to Euclid can never meet on earth, may meet somewhere in infinity. 

And what have Russian boys been doing up till now, some of them, I mean? In this stinking tavern, for instance, here, they meet and sit down in a corner. They've never met in their lives before and, when they go out of the tavern, they won't meet again for forty years. And what do they talk about in that momentary halt in the tavern? Of the eternal questions, of the existence of God and immortality. And those who do not believe in God talk of socialism or anarchism, of the transformation of all humanity on a new pattern, so that it all comes to the same, they're the same questions turned inside out. 

But till I am thirty, I know that my youth will triumph over everything- every disillusionment, every disgust with life. I've asked myself many times whether there is in the world any despair that would overcome this frantic and perhaps unseemly thirst for life in me, and I've come to the conclusion that there isn't, that is till I am thirty, and then I shall lose it of myself, I fancy. Some drivelling consumptive moralists- and poets especially- often call that thirst for life base. It's a feature of the Karamazovs, it's true, that thirst for life regardless of everything; you have it no doubt too, but why is it base? The centripetal force on our planet is still fearfully strong, Alyosha. I have a longing for life, and I go on living in spite of logic. Though I may not believe in the order of the universe, yet I love the sticky little leaves as they open in spring. I love the blue sky, I love some people, whom one loves you know sometimes without knowing why. I lov...

"Poetry is rubbish!" said Smerdyakov curtly. "Oh, no! I am very fond of poetry." "So far as it's poetry, it's essential rubbish. Consider yourself, who ever talks in rhyme? And if we were all to talk in rhyme, even though it were decreed by government, we shouldn't say much, should we? Poetry is no good, Marya Kondratyevna." "How clever you are! How is it you've gone so deep into everything?" The woman's voice was more and more insinuating. "I could have done better than that. I could have known more than that, if it had not been for my destiny from my childhood up. I would have shot a man in a duel if he called me names because I am descended from a filthy beggar and have no father. And they used to throw it in my teeth in Moscow. It had reached them from here, thanks to Grigory Vassilyevitch. Grigory Vassilyevitch blames me for rebelling against my birth, but I would have sanctioned their killing me before I was born th...

LA River & Willow: Take me to the river: Stilt Sandpipers (with Black-necked Stilts for comparison). Have a good weekend! Remember the river.🎈❤️ #rlswihart #lariver #willow #longbeachca #sandpipersofinstagram #stiltsandpiper #blackneckedstilt #nature #beauty #urbanlandscapes #poetry #readmorepoetry2024🎈♥️🪶

"Remember, young man, unceasingly," Father Paissy began, without preface, "that the science of this world, which has become a great power, has, especially in the last century, analysed everything divine handed down to us in the holy books. After this cruel analysis the learned of this world have nothing left of all that was sacred of old. But they have only analysed the parts and overlooked the whole, and indeed their blindness is marvellous.

Early in the game (don't need it till Oct 31): just working on my party costume: Reddish Egret @ Bolsa Chica, doing his frantic dance. Good? Or should I tweak it? (Please respond to the poll below, so I can know your status for All Hallows Eve aka All Owls Eve;)) #rlswihart #workingonmycostume #you? #reddishegret #bolsachica #costumes #beauty #nature #poetry #readmorepoetry2024🎈♥️🪶 🎃🦉 Are you wearing a costume?

"Smerdyakov always pokes himself in now, after dinner. It's you he's so interested in. What have you done to fascinate him?" he added to Ivan. "Nothing whatever," answered Ivan. "He's pleased to have a high opinion of me; he's a lackey and a mean soul. Raw material for revolution, however, when the time comes." "There will be others and better ones. But there will be some like him as well. His kind will come first, and better ones after." "And when will the time come?" "The rocket will go off and fizzle out, perhaps. The peasants are not very fond of listening to these soup-makers, so far."

And did you hear his stupid theory just now: if there's no immortality of the soul, then there's no virtue, and everything is lawful. (And by the way, do you remember how your brother Mitya cried out: 'I will remember!') An attractive theory for scoundrels!- (I'm being abusive, that's stupid.) Not for scoundrels, but for pedantic poseurs, 'haunted by profound, unsolved doubts.' He's showing off, and what it all comes to is, 'on the one hand we cannot but admit' and 'on the other it must be confessed!' His whole theory is a fraud! Humanity will find in itself the power to live for virtue even without believing in immortality. It will find it in love for freedom, for equality, for fraternity."

"Grushenka? No, brother, he doesn't despise her. Since he has openly abandoned his betrothed for her, he doesn't despise her. There's something here, my dear boy, that you don't understand yet. A man will fall in love with some beauty, with a woman's body, or even with a part of a woman's body (a sensualist can understand that), and he'll abandon his own children for her, sell his father and mother, and his country, Russia, too. If he's honest, he'll steal; if he's humane, he'll murder; if he's faithful, he'll deceive. Pushkin, the poet of women's feet, sung of their feet in his verse. Others don't sing their praises, but they can't look at their feet without a thrill- and it's not only their feet. Contempt's no help here, brother, even if he did despise Grushenka. He does, but he can't tear himself away."

"I ask your permission to drop this subject altogether," Miusov repeated. "I will tell you instead, gentlemen, another interesting and rather characteristic anecdote of Ivan Fyodorovitch himself. Only five days ago, in a gathering here, principally of ladies, he solemnly declared in argument that there was nothing in the whole world to make men love their neighbours. That there was no law of nature that man should love mankind, and that, if there had been any love on earth hitherto, it was not owing to a natural law, but simply because men have believed in immortality. Ivan Fyodorovitch added in parenthesis that the whole natural law lies in that faith, and that if you were to destroy in mankind the belief in immortality, not only love but every living force maintaining the life of the world would at once be dried up. Moreover, nothing then would be immoral, everything would be lawful, even cannibalism. That's not all. He ended by asserting that for every individual,...

"Fear nothing and never be afraid; and don't fret. If only your penitence fail not, God will forgive all. There is no sin, and there can be no sin on all the earth, which the Lord will not forgive to the truly repentant! Man cannot commit a sin so great as to exhaust the infinite love of God. Can there be a sin which could exceed the love of God? Think only of repentance, continual repentance, but dismiss fear altogether. Believe that God loves you as you cannot conceive; that He loves you with your sin, in your sin. It has been said of old that over one repentant sinner there is more joy in heaven than over ten righteous men. Go, and fear not. Be not bitter against men. Be not angry if you are wronged. Forgive the dead man in your heart what wrong he did you. Be reconciled with him in truth. If you are penitent, you love. And if you love you are of God. All things are atoned for, all things are saved by love. If I, a sinner, even as you are, am tender with you and have pity o...

First of all, I must explain that this young man, Alyosha, was not a fanatic, and, in my opinion at least, was not even a mystic. I may as well give my full opinion from the beginning. He was simply an early lover of humanity, and that he adopted the monastic life was simply because at that time it struck him, so to say, as the ideal escape for his soul struggling from the darkness of worldly wickedness to the light of love. And the reason this life struck him in this way was that he found in it at that time, as he thought an extrordinary being, our celebrated elder, Zossima, to whom he became attached with all the warm first love of his ardent heart.

1 And as they went on their journey, they came in the evening to the river Tigris, and they lodged there. 2 And when the young man went down to wash himself, a fish leaped out of the river, and would have devoured him. 3 Then the angel said unto him, Take the fish. And the young man laid hold of the fish, and drew it to land. 4 To whom the angel said, Open the fish, and take the heart and the liver and the gall, and put them up safely. 5 So the young man did as the angel commanded him; and when they had roasted the fish, they did eat it: then they both went on their way, till they drew near to Ecbatane. 6 Then the young man said to the angel, Brother Azarias, to what use is the heart and the liver and the gal of the fish? 7 And he said unto him, Touching the heart and the liver, if a devil or an evil spirit trouble any, we must make a smoke thereof before the man or the woman, and the party shall be no more vexed. 8 As for the gall, it is good to anoint a man that hath whiteness in his...

Fyodor Pavlovitch was drunk when he heard of his wife's death, and the story is that he ran out into the street and began shouting with joy, raising his hands to Heaven: "Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace," but others say he wept without restraint like a little child, so much so that people were sorry for him, in spite of the repulsion he inspired. It is quite possible that both versions were true, that he rejoiced at his release, and at the same time wept for her who released him. As a general rule, people, even the wicked, are much more naive and simple-hearted than we suppose. And we ourselves are, too.

Harry K Stammer (harry k stammer): Kinda following in the footprints of Mark Young's Otoliths (still available online but has officially "breathed its last") with UTRICULI. Some wild stuff. Anything goes. You'll enjoy flipping through all of it: Issue 1: Parts 1 & 2. I have three "longish" pieces ("Castlerigg," "Bent Neil," "The Sum of All Our Hopes and Fears") in Part 1. I guess you'll also be able to purchase it on Amazon soon. https://www.sandy-press.com/ #rlswihart #poetry #art #harrykstammer #utriculi #tgif #readmorepoetry2024🎈♥️🪶

“Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don’t know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It’s that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don’t know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.”

In Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles spells it EREG. I finally found it as ERG, which shares a space with erg: a unit of energy. * Anyway, ereg (or erg), from Arabic: a large dune or sand field, having little or no vegetation.

The "sheltering sky" bit: Came out of nowhere. Almost nowhere. An interesting bit, but does it fit?;) * HIS CRY WENT ON through the final image: the spots of raw bright blood on the earth. Blood on excrement. The supreme moment, high above the desert, when the two elements, blood and excrement, long kept apart, merge. A black star appears, a point of darkness in the night sky’s clarity. Point of darkness and gateway to repose. Reach out, pierce the fine fabric of the sheltering sky, take repose.

Turning her back to the rain she gripped the iron railing and looked directly into the most hideous human face she had ever seen. The tall man wore cast-off European clothes, and a burlap bag over his head like a haïk. But where his nose should have been was a dark triangular abyss, and the strange flat lips were white. For no reason at all she thought of a lion’s muzzle; she could not take her eyes away from it. The man seemed neither to see her nor to feel the rain; he merely stood there. As she stared she found herself wondering why it was that a diseased face, which basically means nothing, should be so much more horrible to look at than a face whose tissues are healthy but whose expression reveals an interior corruption. Port would say that in a non-materialistic age it would not be thus. And probably he would be right.

He did not think of himself as a tourist; he was a traveler. The difference is partly one of time, he would explain. Whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveler, belonging no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly, over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another. Indeed, he would have found it difficult to tell, among the many places he had lived, precisely where it was he had felt most at home. Before the war it had been Europe and the Near East, during the war the West Indies and South America. And she had accompanied him without reiterating her complaints too often or too bitterly.

He was not even trying to find the Bar Lucifer; he had given that up. He was trying to lose himself. Which meant, he realized, that his great problem right now was to escape from his cage, to discover the way out of the fly-trap, to strike the chord inside himself which would liberate those qualities capable of transforming him from a victim into a winner.

Credo  quia  absurdum   is a Latin phrase that means "I believe because it is absurd", originally misattributed to Tertullian in his  De Carne Christi .    It is believed to be a paraphrasing of Tertullian's " prorsus   credibile   est ,  quia   ineptum   est " which means "It is completely credible because it is unsuitable", or " certum   est ,  quia   impossibile " which means "It is certain because it is impossible". These are consistent with the anti-Marcionite context in which they occur.    Early modern, Protestant and Enlightenment rhetoric against Catholicism and religion more broadly resulted in this phrase being changed to "I believe because it is absurd", displaced from its original anti-Marcionite to a personally religious context.

 

Eunice left the American Legation about four o’clock. They had been most civil, she reflected. (She was always expecting to intercept looks of derision.) They had listened to her, made a few notes, and thanked her gravely. She on her side thought she had done rather well: she had not told them too much, —just enough to whet their interest. “Of course, I’m passing on this information to you for what it may be worth,” she had said modestly. “I have no idea how much truth there is in it. But I have a distinct feeling that you’ll find it worth your while to follow it up.” (When she had gone Mr. Doan, the Vice-Consul, had heaved an exaggerated sigh, remarked in a flat voice: “Oh, Death, where is thy sting?” and his secretary had smirked at him appreciatively.)

She was always pleased to have Americans come to the house because she felt under no constraint with them. She could drink all she pleased and they drank along with her, whereas her English guests made a whiskey last an hour—not to mention the French, who asked for a Martini of vermouth with a dash of gin, or the Spanish with their glass of sherry. “The Americans are the nation of the future,” she would announce in her hearty voice. “Here’s to ’em. God bless their gadgets, great and small. God bless Frigidaire, Tampax and Coca-Cola. Yes, even Coca-Cola, darling.” (It was generally conceded that Coca-Cola’s advertising was ruining the picturesqueness of Morocco.)

One must have lived in the United States to appreciate the wonder of this place. Still, even here ideas are changing each day. Soon the people will decide that they want their land to be a part of today’s monstrous world, and once that happens, it will be all over. As soon as you have that desire, you are infected with the deadly virus, and you begin to show the symptoms of the disease. You live in terms of time and money, and you think in terms of society and progress. Then all that is left for you is to kill the other people who think the same way, along with a good many of those who do not, since that is the final manifestation of the malady.

OUR CIVILIZATION IS doomed to a short life: its component parts are too heterogeneous. I personally am content to see everything in the process of decay. The bigger the bombs, the quicker it will be done. Life is visually too hideous for one to make the attempt to preserve it. Let it go. Perhaps some day another form of life will come along. Either way, it is of no consequence. At the same time, I am still a part of life, and I am bound by this to protect myself to whatever extent I am able. And so I am here. Here in the Islands vegetation still has the upper hand, and man has to fight even to make his presence seen at all. It is beautiful here, the trade winds blow all year, and I suspect that bombs are extremely unlikely to be wasted on this unfrequented side of the island, if indeed on any part of it. I was loath to give up the house after Hope’s death. But it was the obvious move to make. My university career always having been an utter farce (since I believe no reason inducing a m...

 

She was a little girl and she was crying. The bells of the church were very loud outside, and she imagined they filled the sky. There was an open space in the wall high above her. She could see the stars through it, and they gave light to her room. From the reeds which formed the ceiling a scorpion came crawling. He came slowly down the wall toward her. She stopped crying and watched him. His tail curved up over his back and moved a little from side to side as he crawled. She looked quickly about for something to brush him down with. Since there was nothing in the room she used her hand. But her motions were slow, and the scorpion seized her finger with his pinchers, clinging there tightly although she waved her hand wildly about. Then she realized that he was not going to sting her. A great feeling of happiness went through her. She raised her finger to her lips to kiss the scorpion. The bells stopped ringing. Slowly in the peace which was beginning, the scorpion moved into her mouth....

Three months after the first meeting of Porbus and Poussin, the former went to see Maitre Frenhofer. He found the old man a prey to one of those deep, self-developed discouragements, whose cause, if we are to believe the mathematicians of health, lies in a bad digestion, in the wind, in the weather, in some swelling of the intestines, or else, according to casuists, in the imperfections of our moral nature; the fact being that the good man was simply worn out by the effort to complete his mysterious picture. He was seated languidly in a large oaken chair of vast dimensions covered with black leather; and without changing his melancholy attitude he cast on Porbus the distant glance of a man sunk in absolute dejection. "Well, maitre," said Porbus, "was the distant ultra-marine, for which you journeyed to Brussels, worthless? Are you unable to grind a new white? Is the oil bad, or the brushes restive?"

"Nevertheless," he continued, sadly, "I am not satisfied; there are moments when I have my doubts. Perhaps it would be better not to sketch a single line. I ask myself if I ought not to grasp the figure first by its highest lights, and then work down to the darker portions. Is not that the method of the sun, divine painter of the universe? O Nature, Nature! who has ever caught thee in thy flights? Alas! the heights of knowledge, like the depths of ignorance, lead to unbelief. I doubt my work."

 Three bits: The apartment was on the second floor of what had been, in the eighteenth century, a private townhouse in an old quarter of the capital. Many artists lived in this part of the city, faithful to the principle that in art, the search for the new must be done within a framework of the old. Jonas, who shared this conviction, was delighted to be living in this quarter. * The disciples explained to Jonas at length what he had painted, and why. Jonas thus discovered in his work many intentions that rather surprised him, and a host of things he had not put there. * Until this period, Jonas was always secretly ashamed of his utter inability to judge a work of art. Exception was made for a handful of paintings that transported him, and for obviously crude scribblings, all of which seemed to him equally interesting and indifferent.

“So,” he said, turning again toward Balducci, “what’s he done?” And before the gendarme had opened his mouth, Daru asked, “Does he speak French?” “No, not a word. We’ve been looking for him for a month, but they were hiding him. He killed his cousin.” “Is he against us?” “I don’t think so. But you never know.” “Why did he kill him?” “Family business, I think. One owed the other grain, it seems. It’s not clear. Anyway, he killed the cousin with a billhook. You know, the way you’d kill a sheep, zip!…” Balducci made a gesture of drawing a blade across his throat, and the Arab, his attention attracted, watched him with a kind of anxiety. Daru felt a sudden anger against this man, against all men and their filthy spite, their inexhaustible hatreds, their bloodlust.

 

My Lucky Morning: Saw two coyotes in Bolsa Chica basking by the Huge Horizontal Pipe along the Channel. TGIF. Enjoy your weekend.🎈🎂 Happy 85th Mom!!!❤️ #rlswihart #bolsachicawetlands #huntingtonbeach #localcoyote #socalcoyote #coyotealwayslookback #coyoteonthehighpipe #coyoteolympics #beauty #nature #tgif #happybirthdaymom #poetry #readmorepoetry2024🎈♥️🪶 🎂

"He got that sore lying in America." "Who? What sore?" "I mean Kirillov. I spent four months with him lying on the floor of a hut." "Why, have you been in America?" I asked, surprised. "You never told me about it." "What is there to tell? The year before last we spent our last farthing, three of us, going to America in an emigrant steamer, to test the life of the American workman on ourselves, and to verify by personal experiment the state of a man in the hardest social conditions. That was our object in going there." "Good Lord!" I laughed. "You'd much better have gone somewhere in our province at harvest-time if you wanted to 'make a personal experiment' instead of bolting to America." "We hired ourselves out as workmen to an exploiter; there were six of us Russians working for him—students, even landowners coming from their estates, some officers, too, and all with the same grand object....

Turn Turn Turn. Ruddy Turnstones @ Bolsa Chica (in "fancywear"). Cute as can be.;) #rlswihart13 #rlswihart #bolsachicawetlands #morning #socal #august #summerfun #turnstones #ruddyturnstone #fancywear #nature #beauty #health #praise #poetry #readmorepoetry2024🎈♥️🪶

"Gracious Lady! "I pity myself above all men that I did not lose my arm at Sevastopol, not having been there at all, but served all the campaign delivering paltry provisions, which I look on as a degradation. You are a goddess of antiquity, and I am nothing, but have had a glimpse of infinity. Look on it as a poem and no more, for, after all, poetry is nonsense and justifies what would be considered impudence in prose. Can the sun be angry with the infusoria if the latter composes verses to her from the drop of water, where there is a multitude of them if you look through the microscope? Even the club for promoting humanity to the larger animals in tip-top society in Petersburg, winch rightly feels compassion for dogs and horses, despises the brief infusoria making no reference to it whatever, because it is not big enough. I'm not big enough either. The idea of marriage might seem droll, but soon I shall have property worth two hundred souls through a misanthropist whom y...

The next best thing to being in Poetry Magazine: Having your bio and poem(s) published in The Poetry Foundation. My bio has been in TPF for some while, and now, if you follow one of the links below, you can read my poem "Totem" (first published in Quadrant Magazine and included in my book Woodhenge). I believe a second poem ("Completely Possible") will soon follow. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/people/r-l-swihart https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/1578913/totem #rlswihart #thepoetryfoundation #tpf #totem #poetry #art  #readmorepoetry2024🎈♥️🪶

"Why is she cross now if you are carrying out her 'orders'?" I answered. He looked at me subtly. "Cher ami; if I had not agreed she would have been dreadfully angry, dread-ful-ly! But yet less than now that I have consented." He was pleased with this saying of his, and we emptied a bottle between us that evening. But that was only for a moment, next day he was worse and more ill-humoured than ever.

I love Brothers Karamazov (and can put up with D's "glut of words" because I love the story), but let's see if Demons will keep my attention.;) & There are strange friendships. The two friends are always ready to fly at one another, and go on like that all their lives, and yet they cannot separate. Parting, in fact, is utterly impossible. The one who has begun the quarrel and separated will be the first to fall ill and even die, perhaps, if the separation comes off. I know for a positive fact that several times Stepan Trofimovitch has jumped up from the sofa and beaten the wall with his fists after the most 'intimate and emotional tete-a-tete with Varvara Petrovna.

I had become like a screech owl, but my cries caught in my throat and I spat them out in the form of clots of blood. Perhaps screech owls are subject to a disease which makes them think as I think. My shadow on the wall had become exactly like an owl and, leaning forward, read intently every word I wrote. Without doubt he understood perfectly. Only he was capable of understanding. When I looked out of the corner of my eye at my shadow on the wall I felt afraid.

The only thing that makes me write is the need, the overmastering need, at this moment more urgent than ever it was in the past, to create a channel between my thoughts and my unsubstantial self, my shadow, that sinister shadow which at this moment is stretched across the wall in the light of the oil lamp in the attitude of one studying attentively and devouring each word I write. This shadow surely understands better than I do. It is only to him that I can talk properly. It is he who compels me to talk. Only he is capable of knowing me. He surely understands. . . . It is my wish, when I have poured the juice—rather, the bitter wine—of my life down the parched throat of my shadow, to say to him, ‘This is my life’.

I'd never heard of him (seems he was more of an academic and playwright), but learned a bit about him in his connection with Faye Dunaway and "Hogan's Goat" (his play). Anywho: found this little poem which I kinda like. * To a Friend in Fall Me You’d never recognize I look so old. That Chinese joint upstairs On Fifty-ninth and Third’s Still going. All the rest closed down. Connolly’s downtown And Klube’s went without my knowing. Word’s Out there’ll be another rise in fares. The light’s the same as then, stopped cold, Taken by surprise. We thought we were something, didn’t we.

A little sentence he had once read came into his head: Happy is the man who believes he is happy. Yes, he thought, and more accursed than the murderer is the man who works to destroy that belief. It was the unhappy little busybodies who were the scourge of mankind, the pestilence on the face of the earth. “You dare sit there and tell me they’re happy,” Lee had said to him, the self-righteous glow in her eyes. Surely the intellectuals who had made the French Revolution had had the same expression, like the hideous young men of the Istiqlal, like the inhuman functionaries of the Communist Party the world over.

 

  “I’ll be around,” she said calmly, “because it’s not going to take long.”  It was too bad she had to have opinions; she had been so agreeable to be with before she had started to express them. And then, the terrible truth was that neither she nor he was right. It would not help the Moslems or the Hindus or anyone else to go ahead, nor, even if it were possible, would it do them any good to stay as they were. It did not really matter whether they worshipped Allah or carburetors—they were lost in any case. In the end, it was his own preferences which concerned him. He would have liked to prolong the status quo because the décor that went with it suited his personal taste.

 

The road had dipped down to the river and climbed up again, it had gone near to the ramparts, past the arches of Bab Fteuh, veered off into the country, still descending through deserted terrain, as though it would never stop. When it flattened out, the pace slowed a little, and later, when it began to wind upward once more, the driver occasionally cracked his whip, calling a lengthy, falsetto: “Eeeee!” to the tired horses. “Don’t let him whip them, please,” she implored, as the long leather thong descended with the sound of a firecracker for the fifth or sixth time. Stenham knew the uselessness of arguing with an Arab about anything at all, and particularly if it had to do with the performance of his daily work, but he leaned forward, saying in a tone of authority: “Allèche bghitsi darbou? Khallih.” The fat man turned halfway around and said laughing: “They’re lazy. They always have to be beaten.” “What does he say?” she inquired. Taking a chance, he replied: “He says if you don’t wan...