Tales of Ordinary Madness.

"The free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it - basically because you feel good, very good, when you are near or with them." 

Charles Bukowski (Tales of Ordinary Madness)
 

If you're going to try.

 "If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery--isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you'll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you're going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It's the only good fight there is." 

Charles Bukowski - Factoum

 

Wood + Water

Long ago...
No one tore the ground with ploughshares
Or parcelled out the land
Or swept the sea with dripping oars - 
The shore was the worlds end.
Clever human nature, victim of your own inventions, 
Disastrously creative, 
Why cordon cities with towered walls?
Why arm for war?

- Ovid, Amores, Book 3  

I recently read Ronald Wrights A Short History of Progress (and have just started its continuation, What is America? A Short History of the New World Order).

It was a very moving analysis of the twentieth century's runaway growth of human overpopulation, consumption and technology, and how they have placed such tremendous demands on our natural capital (water, earth and air)  that we may never fully recover from the damage we have done as a civilization in such a minute period of time.

I hope that our civilization will not self-destruct as the early civilization of the Easter Islanders and the Sumerians had done. I find it highly unlikely however, that given the small amount of time we have to engineer environmentally sustainable precautions for running out of our natural capital (namely water, and waters keeper, wood), that mankind has enough sense and foresight to realise that we cannot continue consuming and progressing, as we do. We are burning out of time with the only creature who upholds and supports us and all of our creations, Earth. Like a petulant child who eats all their candy, then feels sick and dies of diabetes.

There is hope; though not for us

-Kafta

 

World At Large

Each one of us is potentially mind at large. We live together, we act on and react to one another but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. Embraced the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self, transcendence in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies, all these are private and except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pull information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves, from family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.

Unknown source. Sounds very Humian, will endeavor to find out where I wrote it down from. I have a feeling it was from a poetry shrine in the Algonquin Hotel (Manhattan) dedicated to the poets of the Round Circle circa 1920s. Dorothy Parker I believe her name was. We shall see how my investigating skills go.

D E A D M A N

The ancient tradition that the world will be consumed in fire at the end of six thousand years is true, as I have heard from Hell.

For the cherub with his flaming sword is hereby commanded to leave his guard at the tree of life, and when he does, the whole creation will be consumed and appear infinite and holy whereas it now appears finite & corrupt.

This will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment.

But first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged; this I shall do, by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid.

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.

For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narow chinks of his cavern.

  - William Blake, A Memorable Fancy, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 

You’re Beautiful

You’re beautiful because you cry at weddings as well as funerals.
I’m ugly because I think of children as another species from a different world. 
 You’re beautiful because you look great in any colour including red.
I’m ugly because I think shopping is strictly for the acquisition of material goods. 
You’re beautiful because when you were born, undiscovered planets lined up to peep over the rim of your cradle and lay gifts of gravity and light at your miniature feet.
I’m ugly for saying ‘love at first sight’ is another form of mistaken identity and that the most human of all responses is to gloat. 

Ugly like he is,
Beautiful like hers,
 Beautiful like Venus,
Ugly like his,
Beautiful like she is,
Ugly like Mars. 

A beautiful poem by English poet, Simon Armitage. This is only a snippet from about half way through (but I think by far the most adorable lines) - hear and read the rest here http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoem.do?poemId=90