Categories
Thoughts on writing Uncategorized video Writing by others

But it’s alright, Ma, it’s life, and life only

This is what rappers can only dream of.

Some of my favorite lines:

So don’t fear if you hear
A foreign sound to your ear
It’s alright, Ma, I’m only sighing

While money doesn’t talk, it swears

But even the president of the United States
Sometimes must have to stand naked

Say okay, I have had enough
what else can you show me?

And if my thought-dreams could be seen
They’d probably put my head in a guillotine
But it’s alright, Ma, it’s life, and life only

It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)
by Bob Dylan

Darkness at the break of noon
Shadows even the silver spoon
The handmade blade, the child’s balloon
Eclipses both the sun and moon
To understand you know too soon
There is no sense in trying

Pointed threats, they bluff with scorn
Suicide remarks are torn
From the fool’s gold mouthpiece the hollow horn
Plays wasted words, proves to warn
That he not busy being born is busy dying

Temptation’s page flies out the door
You follow, find yourself at war
Watch waterfalls of pity roar
You feel to moan but unlike before
You discover that you’d just be one more
Person crying

So don’t fear if you hear
A foreign sound to your ear
It’s alright, Ma, I’m only sighing

As some warn victory, some downfall
Private reasons great or small
Can be seen in the eyes of those that call
To make all that should be killed to crawl
While others say don’t hate nothing at all
Except hatred

Disillusioned words like bullets bark
As human gods aim for their mark
Make everything from toy guns that spark
To flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark
It’s easy to see without looking too far
That not much is really sacred

While preachers preach of evil fates
Teachers teach that knowledge waits
Can lead to hundred-dollar plates
Goodness hides behind its gates
But even the president of the United States
Sometimes must have to stand naked

An’ though the rules of the road have been lodged
It’s only people’s games that you got to dodge
And it’s alright, Ma, I can make it

Advertising signs they con
You into thinking you’re the one
That can do what’s never been done
That can win what’s never been won
Meantime life outside goes on
All around you

You lose yourself, you reappear
You suddenly find you got nothing to fear
Alone you stand with nobody near
When a trembling distant voice, unclear
Startles your sleeping ears to hear
That somebody thinks they really found you

A question in your nerves is lit
Yet you know there is no answer fit
To satisfy, insure you not to quit
To keep it in your mind and not forget
That it is not he or she or them or it
That you belong to

Although the masters make the rules
For the wise men and the fools
I got nothing, Ma, to live up to

For them that must obey authority
That they do not respect in any degree
Who despise their jobs, their destinies
Speak jealously of them that are free
Cultivate their flowers to be
Nothing more than something they invest in

While some on principles baptized
To strict party platform ties
Social clubs in drag disguise
Outsiders they can freely criticize
Tell nothing except who to idolize
And then say God bless him

While one who sings with his tongue on fire
Gargles in the rat race choir
Bent out of shape from society’s pliers
Cares not to come up any higher
But rather get you down in the hole
That he’s in

But I mean no harm nor put fault
On anyone that lives in a vault
But it’s alright, Ma, if I can’t please him

Old lady judges watch people in pairs
Limited in sex, they dare
To push fake morals, insult and stare
While money doesn’t talk, it swears
Obscenity, who really cares
Propaganda, all is phony

While them that defend what they cannot see
With a killer’s pride, security
It blows the minds most bitterly
For them that think death’s honesty
Won’t fall upon them naturally
Life sometimes must get lonely

My eyes collide head-on with stuffed
Graveyards, false gods, I scuff
At pettiness which plays so rough
Walk upside-down inside handcuffs
Kick my legs to crash it off
Say okay, I have had enough
what else can you show me?

And if my thought-dreams could be seen
They’d probably put my head in a guillotine
But it’s alright, Ma, it’s life, and life only

Categories
Poetry Uncategorized

Excerpts from The Man with the Blue Guitar by Wallace Stevens

Previously, I looked at some amazing Wallace Stevens quotes in this post (internal link). Here, Stevens is more fully presented in these excerpts selected by the University of Penn. (external link).

They said, “You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.”

The man replied, “Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.”

Wallace makes a case for the impressionist painter. I’ve always wondered about artists creating photorealism. Make a painting as technically accurate as a photo? What is the point? Other than demonstrating enormous talent and skill, which, of course, has its place and must be praised. Especially by us who can’t draw anything recognizable. Still, what I see and what you see and what we place importance is often quite different. The impressionist gets to share a vision of what they see or what they would like something to be seen as.

Picasso had a blue period from 1901 to 1904. He was depressed and painted  mostly in shades of blue, as if seeking the boundary of what that color could do in art. Always interested in being commercially popular, Picasso eventually turned back to painting with brighter colors, those art pieces selling better. Today, however, many of his blue period pieces sell quite well.

Off subject, slightly, was a gifted felt pen artist I knew who worked in landscape design. She made numerous presentation drawings, works of art, really, which showed a client what their money might buy. Landscape designers and architects, she said, excelled at the color green because nearly everything in a plan symbolized a plant, thus requiring multiple, multiple shades of green to represent all the varieties of plants proposed. Anyone know of other trades that specialize in a single color?

The Man with the Blue Guitar (excerpts)

by Wallace Stevens (1879 to 1955)

I

The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

They said, “You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.”

The man replied, “Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.”

And they said then, “But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,

A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are.”

II

I cannot bring a world quite round,
Although I patch it as I can.

I sing a hero’s head, large eye
And bearded bronze, but not a man,

Although I patch him as I can
And reach through him almost to man.

If to serenade almost to man
Is to miss, by that, things as they are,

Say it is the serenade
Of a man that plays a blue guitar.

III

Ah, but to play man number one,
To drive the dagger in his heart,

To lay his brain upon the board
And pick the acrid colors out,

To nail his thought across the door,
Its wings spread wide to rain and snow,

To strike his living hi and ho,
To tick it, tock it, turn it true,

To bang from it a savage blue,
Jangling the metal of the strings

IV

So that’s life, then: things as they are?
It picks its way on the blue guitar.

A million people on one string?
And all their manner in the thing,

And all their manner, right and wrong,
And all their manner, weak and strong?

The feelings crazily, craftily call,
Like a buzzing of flies in autumn air,

And that’s life, then: things as they are,
This buzzing of the blue guitar.

V

Do not speak to us of the greatness of poetry,
Of the torches wisping in the underground,

Of the structure of vaults upon a point of light.
There are no shadows in our sun,

Day is desire and night is sleep.
There are no shadows anywhere.

The earth, for us, is flat and bare.
There are no shadows. Poetry

Exceeding music must take the place
Of empty heaven and its hymns,

Ourselves in poetry must take their place,
Even in the chattering of your guitar.

VI

A tune beyond us as we are,
Yet nothing changed by the blue guitar;

Ourselves in the tune as if in space,
Yet nothing changed, except the place

Of things as they are and only the place
As you play them, on the blue guitar,

Placed, so, beyond the compass of change,
Perceived in a final atmosphere;

For a moment final, in the way
The thinking of art seems final when

The thinking of god is smoky dew.
The tune is space. The blue guitar

Becomes the place of things as they are,
A composing of senses of the guitar.

VII

It is the sun that shares our works.
The moon shares nothing. It is a sea.

When shall I come to say of the sun,
It is a sea; it shares nothing;

The sun no longer shares our works
And the earth is alive with creeping men,

Mechanical beetles never quite warm?
And shall I then stand in the sun, as now

I stand in the moon, and call it good,
The immaculate, the merciful good,

Detached from us, from things as they are?
Not to be part of the sun? To stand

Remote and call it merciful?
The strings are cold on the blue guitar.

VIII

The vivid, florid, turgid sky,
The drenching thunder rolling by,

The morning deluged still by night,
The clouds tumultuously bright

And the feeling heavy in cold chords
Struggling toward impassioned choirs,

Crying among the clouds, enraged
By gold antagonists in air–

I know my lazy, leaden twang
Is like the reason in a storm;

And yet it brings the storm to bear.
I twang it out and leave it there.

IX

And the color, the overcast blue
Of the air, in which the blue guitar

Is a form, described but difficult,
And I am merely a shadow hunched

Above the arrowy, still strings,
The maker of a thing yet to be made;

The color like a thought that grows
Out of a mood, the tragic robe

Of the actor, half his gesture, half
His speech, the dress of his meaning, silk

Sodden with his melancholy words,
The weather of his stage, himself.

X

Raise reddest columns. Toll a bell
And clap the hollows full of tin.

Throw papers in the streets, the wills
Of the dead, majestic in their seals.

And the beautiful trombones-behold
The approach of him whom none believes,

Whom all believe that all believe,
A pagan in a varnished care.

Roll a drum upon the blue guitar.
Lean from the steeple. Cry aloud,

“Here am I, my adversary, that
Confront you, hoo-ing the slick trombones,

Yet with a petty misery
At heart, a petty misery,

Ever the prelude to your end,
The touch that topples men and rock.”

XV

Is this picture of Picasso’s, this “hoard
Of destructions”, a picture of ourselves,

Now, an image of our society?
Do I sit, deformed, a naked egg,

Catching at Good-bye, harvest moon,
Without seeing the harvest or the moon?

Things as they are have been destroyed.
Have I? Am I a man that is dead

At a table on which the food is cold?
Is my thought a memory, not alive?

Is the spot on the floor, there, wine or blood
And whichever it may be, is it mine?

XXIII

A few final solutions, like a duet
With the undertaker: a voice in the clouds,

Another on earth, the one a voice
Of ether, the other smelling of drink,

The voice of ether prevailing, the swell
Of the undertaker’s song in the snow

Apostrophizing wreaths, the voice
In the clouds serene and final, next

The grunted breath scene and final,
The imagined and the real, thought

And the truth, Dichtung und Wahrheit, all
Confusion solved, as in a refrain

One keeps on playing year by year,
Concerning the nature of things as they are.

XXX

From this I shall evolve a man.
This is his essence: the old fantoche

Hanging his shawl upon the wind,
Like something on the stage, puffed out,

His strutting studied through centuries.
At last, in spite of his manner, his eye

A-cock at the cross-piece on a pole
Supporting heavy cables, slung

Through Oxidia, banal suburb,
One-half of all its installments paid.

Dew-dapper clapper-traps, blazing
From crusty stacks above machines.

Ecce, Oxidia is the seed
Dropped out of this amber-ember pod,

Oxidia is the soot of fire,
Oxidia is Olympia.

XXXI

How long and late the pheasant sleeps
The employer and employee contend,

Combat, compose their droll affair.
The bubbling sun will bubble up,

Spring sparkle and the cock-bird shriek.
The employer and employee will hear

And continue their affair. The shriek
Will rack the thickets. There is no place,

Here, for the lark fixed in the mind,
In the museum of the sky. The cock

Will claw sleep. Morning is not sun,
It is this posture of the nerves,

As if a blunted player clutched
The nuances of the blue guitar.

It must be this rhapsody or none,
The rhapsody of things as they are.

XXXII

Throw away the lights, the definitions,
And say of what you see in the dark

That it is this or that it is that,
But do not use the rotted names.

How should you walk in that space and know
Nothing of the madness of space,

Nothing of its jocular procreations?
Throw the lights away. Nothing must stand

Between you and the shapes you take
When the crust of shape has been destroyed.

You as you are? You are yourself.
The blue guitar surprises you.

XXXIII

That generation’s dream, aviled
In the mud, in Monday’s dirty light,

That’s it, the only dream they knew,
Time in its final block, not time

To come, a wrangling of two dreams.
Here is the bread of time to come,

Here is its actual stone. The bread
Will be our bread, the stone will be

Our bed and we shall sleep by night.
We shall forget by day, except

The moments when we choose to play
The imagined pine, the imagined jay.

Categories
Poetry Uncategorized

Musings by William Barnes

I’m watching Star Trek: Picard on the Paramount+ Channel or whatever the marketing boys call it. The theme for this season revolves around how we as a race are always imprisoned in the past. F. Scott Fitzgerald most famously caught this idea with his last sentence to The Great Gatsby:

“And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

But poets have been going round with this for centuries. William Barnes made his contribution in the 1800’s with lines like this, “The night comes on to star the sky.” Yikes! Scary impressive.

Musings

by William Barnes (1801 – 1886)

Before the falling summer sun
The boughs are shining all as gold,
And down below them waters run,
As there in former years they roll’d;
The poolside wall is glowing hot,
The pool is in a dazzling glare,
And makes it seem as, ah! ’tis not,
A summer when my life was fair.

The evening, gliding slowly by,
Seems one of those that long have fled;
The night comes on to star the sky
As then it darken’d round my head.
A girl is standing by yon door,
As one in happy times was there,
And this day seems, but is no more,
A day when all my life was fair.

We hear from yonder feast the hum
Of voices, as in summers past;
And hear the beatings of the drum
Again come throbbing on the blast.
There neighs a horse in yonder plot,
As once there neigh’d our petted mare,
And summer seems, but ah! is not
The summer when our life was fair.

Reading by Prabir Guha

 

 

Categories
Uncategorized

Let’s Not Forget Madonna

This would have outshined anything at Cochella today.

Great songwriting. Extra points for using Zephyr.

Ray of Light

Zephyr in the sky at night I wonder
Do my tears of mourning sink beneath the sun?
She’s got herself a universe gone quickly
For the call of thunder threatens everyone
And I feel like I just got home
And I feel
And I feel like I just got home
And I feel
Faster than the speeding light she’s flying
Trying to remember where it all began
She’s got herself a little piece of Heaven
Waiting for the time when Earth shall be as one
And I feel like I just got home
And I feel
And I feel like I just got home
And I feel
Quicker than a ray of light
Quicker than a ray of light
Quicker than a ray of light
Zephyr in the sky at night I wonder
Do my tears of mourning sink beneath the sun?
She’s got herself a universe gone quickly
For the call of thunder threatens everyone
And I feel
Quicker than a ray of light
Then gone for
Someone else will be there
Through the endless years
She’s got herself a universe
She’s got herself a universe
She’s got herself a universe
And I feel
And I feel
And I feel like I just got home
And I feel
Quicker than a ray of light she’s flying
Quicker than a ray of light I’m flying

Songwriters: Christine Leach / Clive Maldoon / Dave Curtiss / Madonna Ciccone / William Orbit

Categories
Uncategorized

It’s What’s for Dinner