Althouse: 6:51, 7:05.

September 23, 2020

6:51, 7:05.

Sunrise on the second day of fall.

18 comments:

Lewis said...: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1Z6I62yvfg; 9/23/20, 11:28 AM
Lewis said...: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWmrfgj0MZI; 9/23/20, 11:49 AM
MadisonMan said...: What a fabulous stretch of weather to go with those winning photographs!; 9/23/20, 11:58 AM
ga6 said...: Designed to fail; WGN TV headline 12:14PM:

"Secretary of State’s letter to millions of Illinois voters causes confusion over mail-in voting"; 9/23/20, 12:14 PM
Lewis said...: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYvkICbTZIQ; 9/23/20, 12:25 PM
Bobber Fleck said...: As a duck hunter I am attracted to the lower picture. I can almost smell the muck and the duckweed.; 9/23/20, 1:28 PM
Lawrence Person said...: Why does the liberal Overclass hate Joe Rogan?

Further thoughts on something Althouse linked to yesterday.; 9/23/20, 1:50 PM
MadTownGuy said...: I opened up this tab on my alternate phone and with the display enlarged and slightly off center, all I saw was "Altho" in the header. Very appropriate for a blog where the host doesn't hew to either party line, and who sometimes plays the role of th be contrarian if the need arises.; 9/23/20, 3:38 PM
tim in vermont said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; 9/23/20, 3:55 PM
eddie willers said...: The 2nd photo looks like a Rousseau painting.; 9/23/20, 7:12 PM
Lewis said...: V Novograd-Volynske, v naspekh smyaton gorode, sredi skruchennyky rasvalin; 9/24/20, 3:16 AM
Lewis said...: Everything said forgets it's bon chance
Of an accident that broke my screen as I was
Driving through the dead skirts of Paris:
Where the car must turn but doesn't to the heart of
Those streets smiling and forgetting.

Broken
Beneath that bridge and our youth on its hands and knees
Or back there, the half green lawn, and where jokes
Where a plenty and didn't need to be remembered.

I thought, something strange, like hope might brew
As when - i bought a house, I sawed the wood, and the place dissippeared beneath me.; 9/24/20, 3:18 AM
Lewis said...: Awaiting An Answer.

.1.

Tempered, awkward key
Of that pianos sound
Disturbs sunlit dust,
This corpse's epidermis.
And on afternoons,
It seemed long and desperate,
Searches for that glimpse of woman
Heard in sounds of Joan
Or other musty romances.

Perhaps merely the hair
Reminded of the dust
Of those old school days
Or a pure line expressed
In the profile, catching
A last evaporate fantasy;
Maybe some dim sympathy,
Merely the union of interest
In one trajected plain,
Slim yet a basis for partnership.

.II.

If I’d found a place
It was, as always, momentary,
Caught in a second’s glance of sun:
Blue, common bell chimed its noiseless scent
More irritant to plans, more conducive
To the forgotten, forgetful days of school.

But those other ones: rather a feeling
Than tissue of incident where one hung
At the most appropriate place
As for a meal. Separate, I’d tempt
A natural force to come swing my way.; 9/24/20, 3:37 AM
Lewis said...: After Hours

.I.

Those noises in the blank hour
Between twelve and one,
The ingenuous girl singing a song
Perhaps borne from the late closed pub,
The car alarm that mischievously sputters
Its unfrightening sound off and on,
Drinkers warming themselves
Over the hollow sound
Of their chanted slogans
Ready to beat, in the unifying desire
Of oblivion, any fellow man;
And, in between, quiet and quiet,
This slow, singing, melancholy hour.

And, to distract, the thought of you asleep
Comes and goes like that crying alarm:
Dog barking desires of my frightful cellar.

.II.

If, in this sphere of solitude,
Egocentric and sentimental,
You could somehow intrude,
Could arrive with bags and face turned
To that obscure, private life we somehow share
What, in the broken paces of private habit,
What movement outside it and therefore hope,
Could bloom, stare its tired stare,
Bare from beaten limb (yes, that fellow)
The one, doubled, solitary flower?

.III.

Among the insomniac cars
My shattered face stares whitely
At the moon. The blown flowers
Of our common school die quietly
Aged gestures of a beaten face.
Conversation, left
In my struggling, conceiving days,
Bouncing back from that rough, gauged place,
Poses the question of our death.

Am I then, in this absurd posture,
Abstracted by the flying blue lights
Making those correct, forewarned waves?

Death is a sordid thing
Done by sordid men
Use to a sordid world:

This our modern way
We love but cannot have
The once promised life?

.IV.

My mind has not the peace that’s promised
But a rage, a rage at a limb and joints
Incomplete, broken desire,
The unforewarned abstraction of our death.

And yet if you were here like the nurse
You would find only words of blood
And the absurd indignity of this mans fall.
Death crying (sentimental) among
The blotted whiteness of a ward,
Silhouettes of urgent shadow
And the dark faces beaten beyond; 9/24/20, 3:41 AM
Lewis said...: Talk about 'liberal guilt', when I was 17, after reading Gibbon:

The street II.

Now and then a curtain flits and a stare
At second or third floor windows opposite,
Half inquisitive of hotel happenings,
Half irritated by mock grandeur,
Brute noise this particular Victorian,
Part empty site displays. It’s the habit
Of some drawn up to face, across the nightly peace
Of no mans land, the street, dull combatants
On each side: Perhaps poverty separates you
From the pub downstairs, a certain angst
About the pull of popular haunts,
Getting more than your fair share of inarticulate friends.
A chance modern law decides
Dividing speech and the neighbourhood,
Forming false battles, situating
Between you and it a televisual screen,
Your thought on some Heaven
Where face to face we met,
Your eyes on some dark glass of a window.
You’re seen, the curtains drawn.

It’s something to be remarked upon,
Odd how every night it is done
Not only by you but repeated
Down the street, each side a sentinel,
If not throwing sticks in a fire, then
Looking out to see who’s watching who,
Catching the nightly skirmishes that,
With not uncommon frequency, continue
To punctuate a phoney war. Now and then
That irregular exchange of cigarettes
Or your side strikes the light, mine offers the fag.
Usually, though, askers are causalities
Rejected by us both, mostly ignored,
Often sleeping somewhere out of sight,
Under a bridge or whatever bomb shelter
Accident has devised, they roll in slumber
Tight into a plastic bag or the damp,
Soggy cardboard once used to wrap our guns,
Tanks, communications, surveillance units.

It is to be remarked upon how little
I see of you, how quickly you disappear,
How suspicious of you and I this neutral,
Unneutral status makes us: Together
Manufactured means of war – now we test them out.

But I’m bored of killing, it’s become such a
Common exercise – I wish you’d sign a truce.; 9/24/20, 4:58 AM
Lewis said...: If you look at that beautiful woman behind Kenny ('what condition my condition is in') Oh my god - and yet she must be a granny now - but I obsessively keep playing that song and looking at her!; 9/24/20, 6:34 PM
Lewis said...: She.

.I.

It is not for this that I waited alone,
Listless afore a feeble fire,
The sun impatient to have done.
All the lighting bad no matter its source,
The coarse street shoppers shouting excitement
In fears oblivion: I was patient,
Reading horrid Milton, sipping cheap tea,
Smoking a haze of desire in troubled Pandamonia.
And those ‘after thoughts’ circling a vortex
In the blackened hole of incurable want.

.II.

To long and a chair to comfortable
Excusing the silence of passive desistance:
I claimed ignorance, then corruption,
Then the impossible greatness of the task
And so destiny: fated thus
To the eternal Ovidian whine,
Claiming sanctuary in exile.
The dark obliged, the nocturnal vigil,
The lack of vitamin D:
Cold, an empty gullet, the night.

.III.

One Sunday I ventured out:
The street was the same shabby bin
Of flowering tin and copulent flies.
I discovered the polluted sea
As I had discovered her before:
From the strand and at a distance,
Reflecting a sapien backside,
Resigned, as passive as a slave,
To complexions blare. And so,
Seeing the mutual indifference
Of man and water, I did not protest,
I certainly was not shocked,
I retreated back to my door:
Another forty days vigil
In the barrel of my bed,
Expecting Alexander
With a preprepared, laconic tongue
So to list instructions
Confused but tolerable.

.IV.

Next the eye saw around
The hostility of the times,
The self sacrifice requisite to repair
Deep holes in the fabric
Torn in an uncaring glance.
This was She who held the power to maim,
Taking what accident had gathered
In a forceful hands fine brutality.
Pain of a posterior enervation
Left the relics of charred anatomy
Scattered as an after burn
Whether the death, the caput mortuum
Of an alchemical change
Or the autograph of a miracle –
Who knows?

.v.

Who dances in the Elysian fields
Or laughs in the alley of posterity?
No songs past memories rest: all, all a ball
Of billowing winds wrapping chaos
In the cries of vulgar sentience;
Or the mechanics of bombardment
And the assorted atom contending
For upper air in feverish necessities,
Scratched epitaphs of void.
Death is a place past illusion
Where permanents and eternity
Are finally confounded
As dust across a plain
When a plain has gone.; 9/24/20, 7:06 PM
Lewis said...: Thank you, Anne, for allowing me to post - my stupidity - - your generous, you're very good.; 9/24/20, 7:24 PM