The ramblings of an aging, retired English teacher
18 March 2023 Leave a comment
It snowed again last night,
Not much, but with much wind.
Shallow snow dunes
And concrete bald spots.
Cat footprints in the snow
Coming up the front steps,
Passing along the north side,
Stopping to check something,
And then going down the back walk,
Under the bird feeder,
And heading into the alley
And gone.
Just that.
One cat,
A little snow,
And a lot of wind.
3 July 2022 Leave a comment
Waking this morning, feeling my mortality,
Not just an awareness, but a presence,
An actual thing,
Like the walls and floor and ceiling of this room.
I, a portrait of myself, framed by my mortality.
I am a portrait of me, lying in my bed, doing
Nothing really,
Not waiting for anything,
Not expecting anything.
Nothing’s coming. Just
Lying in my bed,
A still life portrayed – Dormeuse.
Le dormeur mortel,
But not really asleep. Just
Lying in my bed.
There are the sounds of wind in the leaves,
And the spatter of a lingering rain.
A light breakfast today, I think,
For no other reason than to have
A reason to get up.
July 2022
29 June 2022 Leave a comment
Everything means nothing.
Reality is meaningless.
Everything is everything;
But just one thing.
Consciousness,
Which consists of nothing itself,
Gives meaning to all things.
When we are aware of a thing,
That thing exists.
It is not a separate part
Of Reality, however.
Things only exist because
We have brought them into
Our reality.
All things then are constructs
Created by consciousness.
We create all things
And endow them with purpose,
Or no purpose.
Purposeless things, however,
Tend to sink back into
The homogeny of the whole.
Purpose then
Or lack thereof
Serves the intent of the consciousness;
We think we can
Or actually can
Benefit from it.
Purpose implies that all the things
We have or could have brought into existence
Have intent,
And therefore
By extension,
Everything is intentional.
Do we have the snake or maybe reason
Devouring itself by the tail?
Unless one is truly a solipsist,
He or she, or she or he, or they runs into trouble
When one assumes
We have perceived Reality,
When we have actually created
Or perhaps only defined
Our own unique reality,
As has every other consciousness in the universe.
Being one god
Among six and a half billion gods
Is complicated.
Can everyone actually be wrong
About the real reality?
“Everyone!”
Now there’s something to ponder.
Reading Guido Morselli, Dissipatio H. G., and starting to sound a lot like him, but without the references to obscure philosophers. I must read more escapist literature, or Jane Austin to forestall this sort of mind wandering, lest I meet the Minotaur one day.
29 June 2022
1 November 2020 Leave a comment
It’s night, and fall is upon us in earnest.
Last night, the winter galed through the yard
With a fury that rattled of crisis and desperation.
The blanketing leaves raked onto the gardens
Fled back to the lawn and then to the hedge.
Tucked in, the hedge now is bedded for winter.
Snow clinging wetly had urged leaves off
Once laden, powerline-threatening branches,
Now deceased arms, stretching out in despair.
Soon whispering flurries will enshroud it all.
Garden and hedge shall sleep beyond memory.
And the branches shall lose all awareness even of self.
8 April 2018 Leave a comment
When do we apprehend our mortality?
When we look into the mirror and see the same face we saw yesterday?
When we wake stiff and hurting from a night of frequent tosses and turns?
When we look to the left and then to the right and to the left again and to the right again?
When we forget the names of the flowers in the garden we have silently tended year after year?
No.
When we look into the eyes of a child and see the wonder of what is new,
When we observe the tender expression of restrained passion in the faces of young lovers,
When we look at the straight lines and right angles of buildings mounted on the graves of forests,
When we watch as friends and acquaintances of long standing drift silently by as we sit quietly here,
Then we apprehend our mortality.
April 2018
21 January 2018 Leave a comment
Below a bright, white sun there were clouds
Scudding across the clear, sharp sky,
First white and puffy, then flattening and smearing,
And now faded into a grey obscurity.
I know who I am – says the Black girl.
Yo sé quién yo soy – dice el abuelo.
We know who we are – say the Grange men.
We are who we have always been – say the Lakota.
I am not who you say I am – says Samira,
But I know who I am. So who are you to say?
Who are we? And who am I to say,
If we have faded into grey obscurity?
January 2018
2 January 2018 Leave a comment
It is cold and it has been cold for days,
The cold that singes your cheeks
And makes your eyes run,
And your tears freeze.
Burningly cold.
So cold and dry the air feels like sand.
So cold that even with thick socks and mittens
Feet and hands feel buried in cold, sharp, dry sand
Drawing out the heat and moisture
Desiccately cold.
And it is quiet, dead still and cut off.
The windows and doors are closed and sealed
Two, even three deep, holding the cold dead air,
And curtained. The heavy drapes
Silencing the whoosh of traffic,
The thud of human steps
And the birds brittle song.
Deafeningly cold.
Inside, closed in and cut off as in a crypt,
Alone, holding a weeks-long breath of arctic air,
Staring at the white blankness of paper,
I chip words out of my frozen thoughts
As I listen to the booming in the walls
And the cracking of encasing ice.
Perhaps it is terminally cold,
Mummifyingly cold.
January 2018
17 May 2017 Leave a comment
The rain comes, relentless,
Tapping out the rhythm of solitude.
As it darkens again, vision diminishes again,
And time is stretched out farther still.
Alone, how do I comfort myself,
When, alone, I cannot confront myself?
The cat follows me around the house
Feeling exposed to the haunting damp?
And yet on it rains and rumbles.
The plashing of a car ebbing and flowing
Outside as things are washed away.
Inside they are not;
Inside it is already empty.
Outside a downpour,
Inside a deluge of solitude.May 2017
4 January 2017 Leave a comment
... JAEZZ Views 
The Second Coming
19 July 2019 Leave a comment
William Butler Yeats
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
——————————————————————————-
The classic example of Modernism lies in the line “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold,” which by extension declares that there is a moral or social “center” from which we have lost hold, spiraling into the darkness of the unknown, ungoverned by any moral core. This is Yeats’ response to the world of the First World War, a war among wealthy, powerful, rather degenerate and often incompetent European monarchies fought by everyone but them.
How appropriate then for our Post-Modernist time when the world is racked by oppression, conflict, discord and violence in a chaos of the Ongoing World War, a war among wealthy, powerful, degenerate and often incompetent world autocracies, many of whom make war on their own subjects. If there ever was a moral center, it has faded into complete obscurity.
What “rough beast’s” hour is coming around now to save us? How long must we wait for anything to come from without to save us from ourselves?
———————————————
The great lesson of history, well recorded in our Humanities: We have learned nothing from history, except how to repeat it, as this phrase has often coined.
jay@jaezz.org
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Filed under Literary Criticism, Poetry, Politics, Reflections, Social Commentary