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 8 Oct 2004 @ 08:37
White dew on the bramble,
one drop
on each thorn.
---Buson
An artist is usually a damned liar but his art, if it be art, will tell you the truth of his day. And that is all that matters. Away with eternal truth. The truth lives from day to day, and the marvelous Plato of yesterday is chiefly bosh today.
---D.H. Lawrence
From the evening breeze to this hand on my shoulder, everything has its truth.
---Albert Camus
While I was in college in the late 1950s, the Government Department at Bates changed its name to Political Science. I feared the worst, and began to read poetry instead of constitutional law. Political scientists (if there be such things) not only tell us what happened in 2000, they go on to predict 2004. With the mess in Florida lurching the entire world into the US Supreme Court back then, a few states in this country have been seized upon as "swing states," in which our presidential election will be decided. I'm sure someone other than a fortune-teller can tell us how such precognition is determined. I can't though, nor have I been interested in finding out such things since Government changed its name.
Ohio is one of these states. Even if those scientists of the polis hadn't told me, I might have guessed something was up, since at least one of the major candidates is here every day. Most Ohioans I talk to are delighted to receive all this attention and up close contact with these guys. Friends elsewhere in the country and around the world envy us and ask for insight as to what's going on---somehow not satisfied with American news services anymore. Until this week I've felt the giddy power of a junior high school kid who knows a secret everybody wants to find out. Unfortunately that party now is over, and the story breaking out of Ohio is frightening in the extreme. More >
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 6 Sep 2004 @ 11:03
My photo shows Parkersburg High School and us demonstrators at the distance we were kept by police lines, complete with police dogs, Secret Service and SWAT teams. You can see the lights of the football stadium, which obviously is further away still. The other sides of the school and stadium were lined with a fleet of schoolbuses parked bumper to bumper.
Fall River's many white apes
hurry like flying snow
haul their children over the branches
lap at the moon in the water
---Li-Po
Make the universe your companion, always bearing in mind the true nature of all creation---mountains and rivers, trees and grasses, and humanity---and enjoy the falling blossoms and scattering leaves.
---Basho
As naturally as the oak bears an acorn, and the vine a gourd, a man bears a poem, either spoken or done.
---Henry David Thoreau
Parkersburg, West Virginia, is a sleepy town on the Ohio River an hour or so north of Charleston, the state's capitol. The Wood County Seat, for many years it's had a shopping mall that attracts consumers from miles around...including our town which is an hour west. There also are a number of curious federal centers in Parkersburg, chiefly the Bureau of Public Debt---here at a location conveniently out of sight of Washington policymakers. The Parkersburg High School has a football stadium attached which can hold about 9000 people, a graduate told me. What happens to a town like this if the President of the United States decides to stop by on the campaign trail? More >
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 4 Sep 2004 @ 11:15
The seeker is that which is being sought.
---The Buddha
A cool breeze,
the grasshopper singing
with all his might
---Issa
By three methods may we learn wisdom: first, by reflection, which is noblest; second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third, by experience, which is bitterest.
---Confucius
Hitler used the greatest artistic minds he could attract to his administration---filmmakers and architects---to build not only platforms and sets on and in which to speak, but to create an entire Reality in which his followers could live. I hate to be obvious and crass with such a comparison, but the Bush Republicans have done exactly the same thing. Art can create reality, and there's nothing wrong with both parties doing it...but it's vital to know it's being done! The President has used television producers at high undersecretary-of-this-and-that posts to present him heroically. Everyone thinks of the aircraft carrier thing, but remember too the Statue of Liberty speech, the Twin Towers site performance, and of course the Thanksgiving turkey. The major portion of the Reagan book Bush uses, it seems, is the acting---although, as a theatre guy of some years, I'm here to tell you it ain't acting, so much as a lifetime of lying experience that's kept George in the American spotlight. So who writes his material and how is it done? More >
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 27 Aug 2004 @ 15:33
I pack no provisions for my long journey---entering emptiness under the midnight moon.
---Chinese sage
The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colors and their forms, were then to me
An appetite: a feeling and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm,
By thought supplied, nor any interest
Unborrowed from the eye.
---William Wordsworth
I wiped away the weeds and foam,
I fetched my sea-born treasures home;
But the poor, unsightly, noisome things
Had left their beauty on the shore,
With the sun and the sand and the wild uproar.
---Ralph Waldo Emerson
My "nature pictures" are a family joke. There will be a landscape of some sort, and then I must point to a black dot, vague and nearly invisible. That dot might be an owl or a dolphin...perhaps an eagle, a fox. All my nature pictures looks the same, because of the dot. The answer to my problem is simplicity itself: I need a telephoto lens...but it remains a low priority item somehow on my wish list. More >
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 25 Aug 2004 @ 12:42
If we were not already Buddha, we could not bow to the Buddha. When the Buddha receives our bow, we become one with him. At that very moment the practice of the bow is actualized. The Buddha does not force the practice of the bow upon us, but that which has been offered is brought back to us.
---Dainin Katagiri
Silence is as deep as Eternity; speech as shallow as Time.
---Thomas Carlyle
Those who believe they have plenty of time get ready only at the time of death. Then they are ravaged by regret. But isn't it far too late?
---Padmasambhava
For over 40 years I have honored my teacher, mentor, and friend, John Tagliabue. More recently he has retired from work at Bates College in Maine, relocated with his lovely wife Grace to Rhode Island, and encouraged me to distribute his recent poems on the Internet. He doesn't use computers himself, and a couple years ago wrote an elegy to his manual typewriter. When we returned from Canada yesterday, a small envelope of poems were waiting. I think I'd better get them to you right away.
The photo is of John last year at Bates with 2 students who just won the first John Tagliabue Prize For Creative Writing. [link] More >
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