Be Angry At The Sun

[brekin]

Be Angry At The Sun

by Robinson Jeffers

That public men publish falsehoods
Is nothing new. That America must accept
Like the historical republics corruption and empire
Has been known for years.

Be angry at the sun for setting
If these things anger you. Watch the wheel slope and turn,
They are all bound on the wheel, these people, those warriors.
This republic, Europe, Asia.

Observe them gesticulating,
Observe them going down. The gang serves lies, the passionate
Man plays his part; the cold passion for truth
Hunts in no pack.

You are not Catullus, you know,
To lampoon these crude sketches of Caesar. You are far
From Dante's feet, but even farther from his dirty
Political hatreds.

Let boys want pleasure, and men
Struggle for power, and women perhaps for fame,
And the servile to serve a Leader and the dupes to be duped.
Yours is not theirs.

[norton ash]

Not sure how I feel about the poem, but I want to think Jeffers is being fiercely ironic.

Talking casually with a therapist friend after the death of my dad, she asked me about feelings of anger. I said I wasn't angry. She asked "Aren't you angry at cancer?" I said no... that would be like being angry with the ocean.

That public men publish falsehoods
Is nothing new. That America must accept
Like the historical republics corruption and empire
Has been known for years.

All this I understand and expect, but will never accept. I will always be angry at the empire.

[82_28]

All this I understand and expect, but will never accept. I will always be angry at the empire.

Amen homeboy.

Psychotherapy, psychiatry is useless if you are perfectly sad at the state of things and feel it. I have never met a shrink in hard times I might have been going through who I have not thought I would be a much better shrink TO them than they were to me. I give a fuck basically about all people I contact. This is what hurts me most. It's the fact they tell you that "you can't care about everyone and everything all the time -- you need to worry about you right now" etc. They have no answers. Frankly, my mind in it's natural state works circles around these people --they do not "grok" what is bothering me, nobody who hasn't the clinical term of OCD understands what it is like to have it. This makes me feel bad. It honestly and truly shows how worthless and how fake empire is.

It never ended.

There is no place for any of us. I constantly look at myself from various angles at any given moment -- how is she over there looking at me, how is he over there -- how is my distant dad thinking of me right now -- what about my mom -- oh god, I haven't talked to my brother in months -- text girlfriend -- and you know, I really don't care, but I do. They say for OCD it is best to distract yourself. True. It does take the OCD away, but when you wonder about your "distraction", it brings a whole new and furious flush of anxiety. I don't mind the anxiety, but I have a weird propensity to associate fear with any kind of endorphin rush. No matter how good I might feel, I always look around for what is wrong. There has to be something wrong if I feel content. I now realize that this is because I am picking up the lack of empathy within the others I am around -- or how I believe them to be. There needs to be unconditional love at all times. We need to quit protecting ourselves as solitary units living within a simulated community only held up by a fake ass monetary currency and throw it all away and begin loving one another. And I don't mean love as in LOVE love, I mean we need to all cease wishing ill on all living forms and their attendant quirks. no matter how small.

Fine, be angry. But if you're going to give yourself the liberty of being angry you must also add equal parts unconditional love.

Oh and fuck people who fucking say "well, aren't you angry at the cancer?". Fuck them. That's the cancer right there. Add some dimensions to your lives, clinicians! People just fucking hurt sometimes, if not all the time.

[NeonLX]

Thanks for that post 82_28. Very few things in this life have ever rung truer than what you just wrote.

I wish I could express myself that well...the crap that rolls around in my tired old head all the time.

"Lack of empathy"..."simulated community"..."always looking around for what is wrong"..."fake empire"...

All of it, man.

Thanks.

[Simulist]

I agree, Neon.

82_28 understands the world so well because he sees the people in it with real compassion.

[psynapz]

Wow 82_28... what Neon said you said, and then some.

I thought there was something wrong with me that I work that way in my head all the time.

I love you man.

[brekin]

Three more by Robinson Jeffers.


Hope Is Not For The Wise

Hope is not for the wise, fear is for fools;
Change and the world, we think, are racing to a fall,
Open-eyed and helpless, in every newscast that is the news:
The time's events would seem mere chaos but all
Drift the one deadly direction. But this is only
The August thunder of the age, not the November.
Wise men hope nothing, the wise are naturally lonely
And think November as good as April, the wise remember
That Caesar and even final Augustulus had heirs,
And men lived on; rich unplanned life on earth
After the foreign wars and the civil wars, the border wars
And the barbarians: music and religion, honor and mirth
Renewed life's lost enchantments. But if life even
Had perished utterly, Oh perfect loveliness of earth and heaven.

Praise Life

This country least, but every inhabited country
Is clotted with human anguish.
Remember that at your feasts.

And this is no new thing but from time out of mind,
No transient thing, but exactly
Conterminous with human life.

Praise life, it deserves praise, but the praise of life
That forgets the pain is a pebble
Rattled in a dry gourd.

Shine, Perishing Republic

While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening
to empire
And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the
mass hardens,
I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots
to make earth.
Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances, ripeness and deca-
dence; and home to the mother.

You making haste haste on decay: not blameworthy; life is good, be it stub-
bornly long or suddenly
A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than mountains:
shine, perishing republic.
But for my children, I would have them keep their distance from the thick-
ening center; corruption
Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster's feet there
are left the mountains.
And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a clever servant,
insufferable master.
There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught--they say--
God, when he walked on earth.

[brekin]

One more:

The Answer
by Robinson Jeffers

Then what is the answer?- Not to be deluded by dreams.
To know that great civilizations have broken down into violence,
and their tyrants come, many times before.
When open violence appears, to avoid it with honor or choose
the least ugly faction; these evils are essential.
To keep one's own integrity, be merciful and uncorrupted
and not wish for evil; and not be duped
By dreams of universal justice or happiness. These dreams will
not be fulfilled.
To know this, and know that however ugly the parts appear
the whole remains beautiful. A severed hand
Is an ugly thing and man dissevered from the earth and stars
and his history... for contemplation or in fact...
Often appears atrociously ugly. Integrity is wholeness,
the greatest beauty is
Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty
of the universe. Love that, not man
Apart from that, or else you will share man's pitiful confusions,
or drown in despair when his days darken.

[82_28]

To carry on with what I was saying (thanks for the kind words guys, really):

OCD is a disorder of caring too much about the self. But as I have walked this fucking trail for far too long dealing with it, I have come to the realization that it is not me. Yet, it is all me. It's not what I do, but how much emphasis I put on looking at how I must appear to others. Believe me, it is debilitating. I am barely treading water. Yet the key is to always do things selflessly -- to be a receptacle of the pain of others. If you give something away, don't expect it back. Don't be angry about this, but use it to spread love. Unfortunately, this only comes where it can. You cannot force another to love you. And it's not by example either.

Think of it as Shrodinger's Cat. The more words you use to explain it, what it is you are doing, the more likely you are to kill it. Kindness must be done with the expected end result to be nothing in return. You cannot pay some motherfucker $110 an hour to make you somehow feel better. Feeling better is "free". That there are such constraints upon being a human is the key here as well. A squirrel, a bird, an earthworm all spring into life and then now do what they do. They get to "work". However it is our words, inflections, tones, volumes, all kinds of physical expressions which fuck up this nature within all of us. They're not working. We look at them as playing. When in fact what they are doing is what they've been doing ever since our words came around for us to give this shit meaning.

Today I saw a fruit fly, a supremely obnoxious fruit fly and I thought about finding one in some habitation on Mars or on a spaceship. I was alone in this habitation. To see a fruit fly in this case would be to question where it came from, how did it get on board, this is a fellow earthling and I realized, if I was all alone millions and millions of miles from earth, this little bug would become my best friend, perhaps the very last Earth dweller I would ever see. What would I do? How would I treat it? Would I name it? Could I coax it to sleep on my shoulder? Obviously stupid and easily explained away. But I wondered this.

[Blue]

Be Angry At The Sun

by Robinson Jeffers

Let boys want pleasure, and men
Struggle for power, and women perhaps for fame,
And the servile to serve a Leader and the dupes to be duped.
Yours is not theirs.

Thanks for the poetry, brekin. I read all of them that you've posted in this thread and found some wisdom. However I have a problem with this passage. What? Girls don't want pleasure? Women don't struggle for power? And yet he allows that the females perhaps might want "fame." And nothing else? See, this is a problem when men write supposed deep poems about "life." They don't seem to realize that half the humans on this planet are girls and women and they, too, have experiences, observations, pleasures, struggles and yes, hopes and dreams.

You making haste haste on decay: not blameworthy; life is good, be it stub-
bornly long or suddenly
A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than mountains:
shine, perishing republic.
But for my children, I would have them keep their distance from the thick-
ening center; corruption
Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster's feet there
are left the mountains.
And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a clever servant,
insufferable master.
There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught--they say--
God, when he walked on earth.

Again, this author speaks to boys, excluding girls, otherwise he would say children. His message is that females are less than. His message loses weight with that attitude.

[brekin]

Blue wrote:

Thanks for the poetry, brekin. I read all of them that you've posted in this thread and found some wisdom. However I have a problem with this passage. What? Girls don't want pleasure? Women don't struggle for power? And yet he allows that the females perhaps might want "fame." And nothing else? See, this is a problem when men write supposed deep poems about "life." They don't seem to realize that half the humans on this planet are girls and women and they, too, have experiences, observations, pleasures, struggles and yes, hopes and dreams.

You making haste haste on decay: not blameworthy; life is good, be it stub-
bornly long or suddenly
A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than mountains:
shine, perishing republic.
But for my children, I would have them keep their distance from the thick-
ening center; corruption
Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster's feet there
are left the mountains.
And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a clever servant,
insufferable master.
There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught--they say--
God, when he walked on earth.

Again, this author speaks to boys, excluding girls, otherwise he would say children. His message is that females are less than. His message loses weight with that attitude.

I don't see where he says in the poems that women aren't capable of wanting power or pleasure.
When this author speaks to boys, he is speaking to "But for my children, I would have them...".
His children being his two twin sons.So when he says a few lines later "And boys, be in nothing.."
he is actually addressing his sons who are boys.
Really this author only speaks to his sons, and we are all excluded. He is kind enough to let us eavesdrop.
He did have a daughter who died a day after being born. Perhaps if she had lived the poem would have been more politically correct.

[NeonLX]

I don't know how you do it, 82_28, but your reaching way down into my soul with that stuff.

[undead]

Where has my love gone?
How can I go on?
It seems dear love has gone away

Where is my spirit?
I'm nowhere near it,
Oh yes, my love has gone astray

But I'll blame it on the sun,
The sun that didn't shine,
I'll blame it on the wind and the trees

I'll blame it on the time that never was enough,
I'll blame it on the tide and the sea,
But, my heart blames it on me

Who poured the love out?
What made this bitter doubt?
Is peace not here for me to see?

Wish I could tell you,
What I am feeling,
But, words won't come for me to speak

But I'll blame it on the sun,
That didn't fill the sky,
I'll blame it on the birds and the trees

I'll blame it on the day that ended once too soon,
I'll blame it on the nights that could not be,
But, my heart blames it on me

Yeh, yeh, yeh, ooh,
Your heart blames it on you this time

[brekin]

Ante Mortem
by Robinson Jeffers


It is likely enough that lions and scorpions
Guard the end; life never was bonded to be endurable nor the
act of dying
Unpainful; the brain burning too often
Earns, though it held itself detached from the object, often a
burnt age.
No matter, I shall not shorten it by hand.
Incapable of body or unmoved of brain is no evil, one always
went envying
The quietness of stones. But if the striped blossom
Insanity spread lewd splendors and lightning terrors at the end
of the forest;
Or intolerable pain work its known miracle,
Exile the monarch soul, set a sick monkey in the office . . .
remember me
Entire and balanced when I was younger,
And could lift stones, and comprehend in the praises the cruelties
of life.

___________________

I love that line "Exile the monarch soul, set a sick monkey in the office...