The Wide Open Road

"What is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? — it's the too-huge world vaulting us, and it's good-by. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies."

Jack Kerouac, On the Road

Jack Kerouac

Here's Where the Story Ends

The Sundays

She says, 'But in contentment I still feel
The need of some imperishable bliss.'
Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams
And our desires. Although she strews the leaves
Of sure obliteration on our paths,
The path sick sorrow took, the many paths
Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love
Whispered a little out of tenderness,
She makes the willow shiver in the sun
For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze
Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet.
She causes boys to pile new plums and pears
On disregarded plate. The maidens taste
And stray impassioned in the littering leaves.

Excerpted from "Sunday Morning," by Wallace Stevens

Howl

. Madness.

Hundreds of Fireflies

Sky yet violet,
shadows collecting
under the trees

and first stars wan
as night birches, the fireflies
begin: from the first,

the night belongs
to them.
Darkness brightens
them: from our screened porch

we watch their blinkings
sharpen: three, four of them
lighten nightfall of all

solemnity; ten or twelve
and the eyes are led
endlessly astray;

and in deeper night
it’s twenty, fifty, more—a number
beyond simple reckoning—

and still they keep
coming.
No winter
surpasses the flash

of their storm, no spring
their startling growth.
Expanding
to contain them, the night fills

with their soundless poppings,
hundreds of fireflies,
each arhythmic light a trinket

to entice some wayward mate
into the joined darkness
of propagation . . .

So it’s as wooers they come
bumbling to the cottage screens
to illumine palely, eerily

our faces, and but a creature’s
prime, combinatory urge
erects constellations brighter,

nearer than the heavens
will ever be.
Merely
to watch, and say nothing,

gratefully,
is what is best, is
what we needed.
For we’ve seen

stars enough tonight
to hold us through a year
of city living—

lengthening fall nights,
opened trees and the rosy
murk of shopping plazas;

and skies greyly gathering snow,
and the moon of crusted snow,
and marshy April skies clogged

with sediment . . . until the silent
drift of summer through the trees
signals us, drawn too by light,

to another brief firefly season.

Brad Leithauser

Angelica the Doorkeeper

The falcon soars

The town’s gates are even higher

Angelica’s their doorkeeper

She’s wound the sun round her head

She’s tied the moon round her waist

She’s hung herself with stars.

– Anon.

Today in Casa West

"It's bad when you've got big balls."

The Aliens

you may not believe it
but there are people
who go through life with
very little
friction or
distress.
they dress well, eat
well, sleep well.
they are contented with
their family
life.
they have moments of
grief
but all in all
they are undisturbed
and often feel
very good.
and when they die
it is an easy
death, usually in their
sleep.

Charles Bukowski

A Lifetime Burning

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

From "East Coker" by T.S. Eliot

"East Coker" is the second of Eliot's "Four Quartets." The quartets were written over a period of about six years. I've posted this bit elsewhere and before, but it remains a favorite, so here goes again.

Song for Tuesday

Because I woke up with it stalking my thoughts this morning.

Tonight, the Infinitesimal

Tonight, in the infinitesimal light of the stars,
The trees and flowers have been strewing their cool odors.
I walk among them, but none of them are noticing.
Sometimes I think that when I am sleeping
I must most perfectly resemble them--
Thoughts gone dim.
It is more natural to me, lying down.
Then the sky and I are in open conversation,
And I shall be useful when I lie down finally:
The the trees may touch me for once, and the flowers have time for me.

From "I am Vertical" by Sylvia Plath

Westward Ho.

We're charting our Westward course as the time of departure nears. Mountain lions stalk the foothills above our fair town and yet we shall brave it, wishing the cat would come back and the time travel worked a bit better. This fiction, oh, why do we maintain it? Wizard Island awaits, and there, we shall receive further instruction.

To Climb Clear of the Wrong Beginnings

Aubade, by Phillip Larkin

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.
The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
- The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused - nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.


This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear - no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anasthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small, unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can't escape,
Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

Killing/Waking

The Waking

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.

BY THEODORE ROETHKE

Isolated Hearse of My Sleep

...
Isolated hearse of my sleep,
shepherd's house of my insanity,
the vehicle veers on the grass
of the obliterated highway:
and in the defect at the top
of the right-hand windowpane
revolve pale lunar figures, leaves, and breasts. --

A very deep green and blue invade the picture.
Unhitching near a spot of gravel. --
Here will they whistle for the storm,
and the Sodoms and Solymas,
and the wild beasts and the armies,
(Postilion and animals of dream,
will they begin again in the stifling
forests to plunge me up to my eyes
in the silken spring?)
And, whipped through the splashing of waters
and spilled drinks, send us rolling
on the barking of bulldogs...

From "Common Nocturne" by Arthur Rimbaud

Clara Rockmore - Theremin

Turns out even animals can be theremins. Or at least Rat Terriers can be.

Love in the Asylum

A stranger has come
To share my room in the house not right in the head,
A girl mad as birds

Bolting the night of the door with her arm her plume.
Strait in the mazed bed
She deludes the heaven-proof house with entering clouds

Yet she deludes with walking the nightmarish room,
At large as the dead,
Or rides the imagined oceans of the male wards.

She has come possessed
Who admits the delusive light through the bouncing wall,
Possessed by the skies

She sleeps in the narrow trough yet she walks the dust
Yet raves at her will
On the madhouse boards worn thin by my walking tears.

And taken by light in her arms at long and dear last
I may without fail
Suffer the first vision that set fire to the stars.

Dylan Thomas

Abastract Film Circa 1950

Harry Everett Smith, born Portland, Or. 1923 was, besides an experimental film maker, the greatest living magician. This according to Kenneth Anger. He was also an ethnomusicologist, mystic and all around nutter. My kinda guy. He died at the Hotel Chelsea in 1991, adding his ghost to the many that frequent it. Dylan Thomas, Nancy, I forget who else. Great ghosts they have.

In The Store

"What would happen if I threw this jar of Noxema as hard as I could?"

Sweet Tides

Mad Girl's Love Song

"I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)"

Sylvia Plath

Today in Casa West

"They probably won't have any slut whores in there."

Was ist Das?

Sky

Song for Sunday

A Little Treat

Something pretty for tonight. It will help the moon along in the sweet strange nothing. Mind the depths and the currents. (thanks)

If You Were a Bluebird

Today in Casa West

"It's 59 degrees out. I'm freezing."

Dark Matter

Trying to capture these fireflies in a jar, and with them the sound of cicadas, which wouldn't be complete without that undefinable scent which so defines this place. I don't dare try for the thousand years old light of distant stars, but I'll try, nevertheless. Imaginings are dangerous things. Their wings are their own. Every magician knows the cat is out there, dead and alive forever, both in and out of the box. Try to unimagine. Can't be done. Even stopping one is nearly impossible.

Thanks for the Treat

http://youtu.be/pj3vXkhqszE



Siver moon sparkling. For forever or a long time.

In The Store

"What would happen if I threw this block of cheese as hard as I could?"

Pink Room

The Pink Room from David Lynch MC on Vimeo.

Today in Casa West

"Does anyone ever water these plants?"

Today in Casa West

"That video isn't as funny as you think it is."