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Repost: Hoping This Helps Someone Somewhere

No matter how difficult your situation is, I hope you find peace.

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT TO FOLLOW

NightWare Review Part One (internal link)

NightWare Review – Part Two (internal link)

NightWare Review – Part Three (internal link)

NightWare Review – Part Four (internal link)

NightWare Review – Part Five – Final (internal link)

My first suicide attempt (internal link)

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Nightmare Review Part Two: Another Effort to Get Out the Word

This is a reposting in case someone can be helped by this system. It was certainly a total failure for me but perhaps someone else may get assisted.

NightWare™ review. A review of NightWare.™

Transcript delayed due to the death of a friend.

NightWare Review – Part One (internal link)

NightWare Review – Part Three (internal link)

NightWare Review – Part Four (internal link)

NightWare Review – Part Five – Final (internal link)

My first suicide attempt (internal link)

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT FOLLOWS

[00:00:06.890]
Hi, this is Thomas Farley. This is my second video on the Night Ware system. I hope hope you’re doing well or at least coping. I wish the best for you.

[00:00:32.670]
There’s so much information. I’m not sure how to present this. I’m just going to go in and pull out what I think are the most important points from my point of view. When I’m working, I am a professional writer and editor. Perhaps I take offense at this material more than I should.

[00:01:01.930]
I got the watch.

[00:01:09.350]
I have an Apple watch already, so I’m familiar with this, but at least several times I stopped the recording of the device and I thought I pressed the stop button, but it continued to run and record and eventually essentially timed out very puzzling. If the wrist strap isn’t tight enough, it will stop recording your heart rate. You’ll get a message saying there’s been no heart rate detected for ten minutes and it will stop and I don’t have the screenshots, but several times at least three or four didn’t work as they should.

[00:02:06.710]
And I wanted it to get right because there’s this initial calibration period that they talk about. I wanted to make sure the watch was working correctly and didn’t know if it was working correctly, and that’s a problem with the tech support not being available at night when us nightmare suffers are up at night, and of course, nothing on the weekend.

[00:02:27.350]
So rather than getting this resolved in real time, it has to wait. And anyway, so the watch seems to be working now correctly. It stops when it should stop, starts when it should stop or start.

[00:02:56.910]
When I was having those events, what I did was started a dream diary. So if something like that went wrong, I noted the time so that I thought we could go back to the charts and correct them. Similarly, when it was sounding off incorrectly, like once I pulled up on the sheets too hard and it marked this thing they call an acceleration when in fact just pulling up the sheets too hard. So I had this idea that I would make all these notes on these false positives.

[00:03:32.430]
Such an ugly phrase, but false positives.

[00:03:35.670]
And then somebody at night where we would go back correct the record so that the algorithm could learn. Because how else can the algorithm learn about an event like pulling up the sheets too hard if that only occurs every five, six days? Similarly, the literature says you can use the restroom, just take a short break, come back and it won’t affect the record. But each time I did a short break, it would sound off. So again noted that in my sleep Vlog because this is the first couple of days and I actually keep a sleep blog for your own records, but there’s nobody at night where that’s going to go back and reconcile this the algorithm is running on its own, which I found out later.

[00:04:35.190]
It’s a lot of stress before I found that out for, like, bathroom behavior. The Apple watch has a gyroscopic function, which you may be aware of, and so it can track movement, get out of the bed, move toward the bathroom and back. So it is probably recording that event as an activity, logging it and then over time, maybe dismissing it. But this initial calibration that I read about apparently finally got an email on this.

[00:05:20.210]
You’ll get no interventions. The initial calibration period lasts one to three nights. After the system collected 1000 samples.

[00:05:32.210]
I thought with such a wide variety of activity possible at night that it would take a long time to dial in. And tech support is saying it actually happens in one to three nights. So problem is, you’re new to the watch. You’re turning it on and off. You may have really ragged sleep like I do.

[00:05:58.190]
And because of that, I was turning the watch off repeatedly when I would get up for a couple of hours, because I have my insomnia.

[00:06:10.010]
Actually, that’s probably not a good idea. Probably keep it on at all times, because what happens is there’s this 30 minutes window when you hit the pillow and between that? Well, actually, when you go to sleep, when it first registers that you’re sleeping, it will provide none of these interventions. None of these tap on the wrist for 30 minutes. You’re on your own for that 30 minutes.

[00:06:35.210]
And some of my worst nightmares hit me as soon as I put my head on the pillow. And there’s nothing to be done about that. Tech support repeatedly claims that an improvement in that area would require FDA approval. I don’t see why that would be such a problem. Perhaps it is what we have is adaptive technology within limitations undisclosed so that it doesn’t adapt, for example, to that 30 minutes window.

[00:07:15.110]
It’s not going to lower it, and it also won’t adapt to if you have anything outside the criteria or the settings of what they deem a nightmare, that is your stress level, measuring your heart rate, your movement in bed, some other factors that I’m still not aware of. If that criteria isn’t reached, then it’s not going to be considered a nightmare. You will not get an alert, you will not get one of their so called interventions. And again, without reconciling your chart with your sleep log, it’s going to be saying, maybe happily, that we provided five interventions when, in fact, they could have been false readings, false alerts.

[00:08:14.210]
But again, the bottom line, nobody is going to reconcile your sleep record with your actual chart.

[00:08:26.910]
What else? Yeah, I thought I was going to flip through some of this, but actually trying to think if there’s anything important, a lot of us have nightmares. That may not be the classic you’re killing somebody or somebody’s killing you, but you just might be having to watch. I don’t know, a loved one being tortured or suffering, and it may go beyond going. I had a nightmare the other night where I had lost my cat in a retail store.

[00:09:07.490]
Fremont is an indoor cat and had a huge store running all over the place. Can’t contain them, can’t collect them. And this goes on and on and you would say, well, so what? It’s a cat. You’re running out of a cat.

[00:09:21.110]
But the anxiety and the stress which just goes on and on is just one of these what I would call stress dreams. And people dismiss them because they don’t have the same level of anxiety that I do. Or maybe they’ve never had a cat on the loose and they can’t find it. It’s lost. You can’t get it back.

[00:09:45.170]
That’s incredibly stressful. It doesn’t have to be chopping up people for me to constitute an extremely difficult to deal with situation. And a lot of this is a background to my sleep. And I’m really bothered by the fact that that stuff. They just keep going.

[00:10:06.290]
Now, at this point, this guy just would probably like to put down praise in which has never worked for me before. One of the few dreams that are actually prescribed for nightmares. I’m sure most of you have used it and know that it really doesn’t work for most people because otherwise VA hospitals would be cleared of PTSD victims in a hurry. But the other thing introducing other medicines. I don’t know how you’re going to tell what’s working or what’s not.

[00:10:42.050]
Maybe three of them can clear up the lower level stuff and the night where system can clean up the more violent stuff. It’s just an experiment right now. I’m going to end the video with those random thoughts, and I hope something helps you. My email is Thomasfarley at Fastmail. Com.

[00:11:02.030]
Thomasfarley at Fastmail. Com. And you’re free to email me and we can commiserate with this. And I’m really hoping for the best for this product. I really hope tonight that you don’t have any nightmares.

[00:11:16.130]
I really hope tonight is a good night for you. And let’s hope that for everybody. So thank you.

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These Are the People I Deal With

I don’t expect anyone to read this except for search. And I don’t expect anyone to sympathize with my complaints, either, because this is the way the world is arranged. I’ve was raised to be a nice person but there are too many mean people to overcome. This is not something I can win. And, given my constant nightmares since 1988, not something I can cope with.

 

[00:00:03.650]
This weekend at a community picnic, I was introduced to an old cowboy who asked me what I did for work. I told him that I work part time online, at which point the conversation quickly drifted south because of him. He told me that the greatest computer was between our two ears, the human brain. And I said, I agree with that.

[00:00:39.770]
He then went on with a whole series of statements and questions that were aggressively going after. I think I think when I start talking about computers and what I do online, it’s so far out of reach of most people that they think that I’m trying to be smarter than them, or somehow they feel inferior. I think that’s a great deal of it. They have an inferiority complex to anybody that’s working with computers. They act as if I’m trying to prove that I’m smarter than them, when in fact, I usually don’t start the conversation at all because I’m so far out of reach with what I’m doing, with what most other people do that it’s not even worth bothering to talk about.

[00:01:31.860]
Like all of the work that I’m doing with AI and Chat right now. And it’s very discouraging because I had a friend say to me recently that it was possibly economic, because not everybody can afford a computer or the resources that I have, and that’s not really the case at all. I should probably stop at this point and refresh everyone’s memory that early on, before the Internet went commercial, back in about 94, 95, with the advent of Mosaic. Mosaic was the first graphical based Internet browser that you could see images with that became relatable to people. Images provided a boost to advertising, but librarians had been on computerizing, their catalog, card catalogs, for years before.

[00:02:42.790]
And so when personal computers came out, they started populating libraries with them. Especially, really around 84, when IBM came out with its own personal computer for the masses. There was this Charlie Chaplin advertising campaign that was hugely successful. But years before, Apple had been trying really, really hard to place computers in the school to get these lucrative contracts, and they did a good job. They started about 1980 with the Apple II.

[00:03:18.270]
So by the end of the 80s, computers were basically in every library and school. And so everyone’s had an opportunity since then to use computers in one way or another. Night school classes, adult education classes since really the late 80s, early ninety s. And I’ve actually been on computers since 1978. Over 40 years.

[00:03:46.230]
Everybody’s had a chance. But an idiot like this that I was talking to, he doesn’t want to go to the library. I’m sure he hasn’t been to the library in decades. He probably can’t remember when he checked out a library book last. I have many computers.

[00:04:02.350]
I think I have two desktops, two laptops, two tablets. I also have a library card from Pahrump. A library card from Goldfield and a library card from Tonopah. And I am in those libraries, actively. I’m checking out books.

[00:04:22.130]
All of those libraries have a computer. I think it’s just laziness on most people’s part and not having an interest. It’s easier to put down somebody for what they do than to ask about it or just say simply nothing at all. These are the people that drive me crazy. There’s so much amazing stuff going on and I don’t mind if they’re not interested, but it’s the librarians that I’m infuriated with.

[00:04:53.090]
They’re the gatekeepers in education and they don’t want to know about Chat or AI. So it’s not really economic. It is a deliberate decision on many people’s part not to engage, not to learn, to let the things go by. And people that are actually interested, that are burning to create, that are trying new things, that are experimenting with new things, those are people that are something to be put down on because I think it might remind them of how little they want to know, how content they are with their own little world. And that’s fine as long as you don’t go out and bully people or put people down.

[00:05:38.570]
This is the way I can make some money. I can make this money part time. I’m doing a good service and yet I have people people commenting who don’t even know the basics of writing and business writing.

[00:05:55.970]
Self-sustaining freelance writers are maybe four or 5% of the population. That’s it. Everybody else is doing a second 3rd, 4th job to enable their hobby or their passion the and as far as nonfiction writing goes, nobody understands that. As far as business SEO, there’s nobody that I know, haven’t known for a couple of decades that has any idea of what I’m doing. But if they ask, if I try to explain, it’s just an immediate putting down of what I do.

[00:06:40.750]
It’s just this prejudice against the unknown, which is really the root cause. If you don’t know something, if somebody knows something you don’t, you don’t want to hear it. Instead of asking questions about it or letting it go, they want to put it down because they’re bullies. That’s all they can do. They’re trolls.

[00:06:59.990]
And maybe it reminds them of the fact that they’re dead to the world, that they have no interest in inquiry.

[00:07:10.170]
Anyway, I just wanted to put down what I have to deal with almost every day in my effort to be creative. I really have to keep it hidden. Can’t discuss it because it’s like we’re going back to the Dark Ages. One idiot, in fact, who’s in charge of something historical, he was talking about computer literacy, computer literacy in such a way that I asked him this:

[00:07:43.400]
You’re not holding out computer illiteracy as a point of pride, are you? And this guy’s a former engineer and he thought about it and said, that’s a good question, actually. I am. This is a living, breathing, talking luddite. He doesn’t want to learn.

[00:08:02.380]
He wants to put down people for learning. We’re going to go back 300 years into the Dark Ages when people were prosecuted and killed for trying to learn things, for trying to advance science. We’re going to try to discredit them. Or Mao’s Cultural Revolution, in which anybody with higher learning or higher ambition was killed. That’s what we’re going to get.

[00:08:29.090]
We’re going to go back to the Dark Ages and then we’re going to take 300 years to come back again. At the end of the Dark Ages, they had to reinvent all the math that the Greeks had done, what, 1500 or  2000 years before, because people were criticized and killed for trying to learn new things. And now we have people writing about chat and AI who don’t actually use it, haven’t experimented with it, but don’t want to learn. They just want to put it down. So it’s frustrating, but that’s the world we live in.

 

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That Drippy Clock of Dali — The Persistence of Dior

Persistence of Memory by Dali, we all know it. And no matter how it is explained, it is still an icky looking painting.

Here’s my reimagining something prettier but it just didn’t come about and I am done messing with it.

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Caliban in the Coal Mines (slight repost)

Mining powers Nevada as it does so much of the West and the World. An activity as nearly old as Man himself.

I’m reposting this because Untermeyer needs more recognition for his poetry as does Julie Bennett Hume for her haunting performance of this prose.

Caliban in the Coal Mines

By Louis Untermeyer 1885- 1977

Transformed into song by Julie Bennett Hume

God, we don’t like to complain—
We know that the mine is no lark—
But—there’s the pools from the rain;
But—there’s the cold and the dark.

God, You don’t know what it is—
You, in Your well-lighted sky,
Watching the meteors whizz;
Warm, with the sun always by.

God, if You had but the moon
Stuck in Your cap for a lamp,
Even You’d tire of it soon,
Down in the dark and the damp.

Nothing but blackness above,
And nothing that moves but the cars—
God, if You wish for our love,
Fling us a handful of stars!

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Remembering Michael Duffet. (Again.)

Some bot at Legacy.com is asking people to go back to guest books they have signed in the past. Perhaps add a little more. So I did.

Michael was a challenging man; he did let you escape back into the bliss of ignorance once telling you the truth. “You haven’t read that book, Thomas? Oh, dear. You must, you absolutely must.” “That haiku is is pleasant but you don’t have a reference to a season. It’s not just a matter of getting the right syllable count, you must have a seasonal reference. Read the great masters of Haiku.”

Today’s Writing at Legacy

Michael is still dearly missed by everyone who know him; I’ve written below on how much he impressed me, by extension, everyone else must have been. Michael would have pointed out that fallacy in logic (post hoc ergo propter hoc) but I stand by it. You’d never forget your house burning down, your wedding, the birth of a child, the loss of same. So, too, with Michael. You could never forget him and there is no recovery with time. A loss great and felt continually.

Past Writing at Legacy

I was living in Isleton while Michael was the editor of the Rio Vista Herald and Isleton Journal, a cut and paste weekly newspaper. I reached out to Michael when I moved to Isleton because it seemed there were no other writers in the area.

I was totally overwhelmed by his education, Cambridge, and by the depth of his reading. He was kind and warm and explained things well. His newspaper office desk was littered with texts in Japanese and Arabic.

He said he had spent five years with the Bedouins in what I will call Arabia, before heading east through India and on to Japan. The stories all seemed legendary and at all times thoroughly believable. He said he once met the Beatles and I am sure he did.

My condolences to his family, students, and friends. He was a good man.

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And This is How You Get a Nobel Prize

Idiot Wind by Bob Dylan

Selected lyrics:

Someone’s got it in for me
They’re planting stories in the press
Whoever it is I wish they’d cut it out quick
But when they will I can only guess
They say I shot a man named Gray
And took his wife to Italy
She inherited a million bucks
And when she died it came to me
I can’t help it if I’m lucky

Idiot wind
Blowing every time you move your mouth
Blowing down the back roads headin’ south
Idiot wind
Blowing every time you move your teeth
You’re an idiot, babe
It’s a wonder that you still know how to breathe

In the final end he won the wars
After losin’ every battle

I woke up on the roadside
Daydreamin’ ’bout the way things sometimes are
Visions of your chestnut mare
Shoot through my head and are makin’ me see stars

Blood on your saddle

It was gravity which pulled us down
And destiny which broke us apart

The priest wore black on the seventh day
And sat stone-faced while the building burned

I waited for you on the running boards
Near the cypress trees, while the springtime turned
Slowly into autumn

Down the highway, down the tracks
Down the road to ecstasy
I followed you beneath the stars
Hounded by your memory
And all your ragin’ glory

You’ll never know the hurt I suffered
Nor the pain I rise above
And I’ll never know the same about you
Your holiness or your kind of love
And it makes me feel so sorry

Idiot wind
Blowing through the buttons of our coats
Blowing through the letters that we wrote
Idiot wind
Blowing through the dust upon our shelves
We’re idiots, babe
It’s a wonder we can even feed ourselves

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Just Like Honey by The Jesus and Mary Chain

1985. We’re in an echo chamber with a Scottish band called The Jesus and Mary Chain. Life is good. Or, we’re watching the melancholy ending to Lost in Translation, with two not so different people returning to their very different lives. After they saw What Might Have Been. And, now, What Will Never Be.


Lost in Translation Ending

The song begins at 1:48 but you should start at the start.

Lyrics

Listen to the girl
As she takes on half the world
Moving up and so alive
In her honey dripping beehive
Beehive
It’s good, so good, it’s so good
So good
Walking back to you
Is the hardest thing that
I can do
That I can do for you
For you
I’ll be your plastic toy
I’ll be your plastic toy
For you
Eating up the scum
Is the hardest thing for
Me to do

Just like honey
Just like honey
Just like honey
Just like honey
Just like honey
Just like honey
Just like honey
Just like honey
Just like honey
Just like honey
Just like honey
Just like honey
Just like honey
Just like honey
Just like honey
Just like honey
Just like honey

Source: LyricFind

Songwriters: James McLeish Reid / William Adam Reid

The song begins at 1:48. Are you going to skip? Really?

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“Time Does Not Bring Relief; You All Have Lied” by Edna St. Vincent Millay

If life wasn’t built on lies there might not be much of a world at all. That includes Edna, too. For the public’s acceptance of her poetry, she describes missing a man. When, in fact, it was undoubtedly a woman.

“Life must go on; I forget just why.” Millay.

By Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892 – 1950)

Time does not bring relief; you all have lied
Who told me time would ease me of my pain!
I miss him in the weeping of the rain;
I want him at the shrinking of the tide;
The old snows melt from every mountain-side,
And last year’s leaves are smoke in every lane;
But last year’s bitter loving must remain
Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide.
There are a hundred places where I fear
To go,—so with his memory they brim.
And entering with relief some quiet place
Where never fell his foot or shone his face
I say, “There is no memory of him here!”
And so stand stricken, so remembering him.

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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.