Truth-telling is tricky . . .
In Tew's day's mailbox as the heat-hammer returns to Okieland . . .
“The Way, Lao Tzu told, cannot be told.” – jb
Wisdom without intelligence can still lead to a good, simple life. Intelligence without wisdom is a special (and dangerous) form of stupidity. – Mark Manson
If we no longer see into the lives of other animals, it’s not because they don’t have minds or we can’t. It’s because we don’t want to. Yet now we’re told that everything should make way for humankind’s greatest invention: artificial intelligence. This is a far more dangerous delusion than anything dreamed up in a church. In this cult of freedom, nothing much is said of the consequences for the eight million or so species that live alongside us. Little is said for the passing of all the intelligence found in flesh and bone, feather and fang.
[W]e are, a thinking and feeling colony of energy and matter wrapped in precious flesh that prickles when it’s cold or in love. We are a creature of organic substance and electricity that can be eaten, injured and dissipated back into the enigmatic physics of the universe. The truth is that being human is being animal. This is a difficult thing to admit if we are raised on a belief in our distinction. – Melanie Challenger in How to Be Animal: A New History of What It Means to Be Human cited by Maria Popova in The Marginalian.
Speaking of truth-tellers:
Nelson Mandela was born in Mvezo, South Africa on this date in 1918; and it's the 117th anniversary of Clifford Odets' birth. The playwright born in 1906 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Consistent with today's theme, The Great Fire of Rome began in the late evening hours on this date in 64 A.D. The fire raged for six days, during which time Emperor Nero either acted heroically or played his lyre and watched the city burn — depending on whose version you believe. There are no surviving primary accounts of the fire, so we have to base everything we know on hearsay.
[T]truth is a little bigger and more complex than any clear statement can sort out . . . you’re going to need to approach it through imagery and metaphor . . . There isn’t some sort of coded message inside a poem, like a safe with a code. The point of the poem is the reading of the poem itself . . . the experience produced by the reading . . . [It's]much more about undergoing something than understanding something. — Tish Harrison Warren, “Why Does God Keep Making Poets?” on the opinion page of the 7.16.23 NYTimes .
[P]oetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening . . .
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.– W.H. Auden, In Memory of W.B. Yeats, edited by jb
Tell all the Truth but tell it slant —
Tell all the Truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —
– Emily Dickenson
Today's post was prompted by my friend Jim. Thanks Jim.
Come hail or high water . . .
In the mailbox this new-moon day with rain chances here in TulseyTown . . .
Every day is a poem
I’ve been a performer most of my life and worked hard at it and now I find out that chaos works better. Just keep changing the subject and never betray panic. – Garrison Keillor
After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness. The story is similar in many other countries, if not quite so positive. – David Leonhardt in the NYTimes.
When it rains, it should be raining
There are at least ten-thousand things
and most all have a voice of some kind.
Most of them, tho
can't be specified or enumerated with
by or on a spread-sheet. That said,
it was you I heard
this morning just at sunrise.
There were 17 of you
but you flew as one overhead
all of us headed for the Heron pond,
talking, it seemed, about the day ahead:
Wonderments about your cousins
– the frogs – barking like
the neighborhood dogs
at your graceful, noisy, arrival.
Sometimes you whisper
in the leaves and grasses, and
once, all at the same time,
your thunder
announced that rain
was about to speak.
jb – shared on Prolific Press' Poets' virtual.
Caught in the rye . . .
The mailbox this Sol's day opens to a lovely, mild summer morning in Okieland . . .
Life is extraordinary and miraculous. Rather beyond imagining. The world we want will not emerge from electronic speed but from the receptive stillness at our center. If the world seems to be moving too fast, the way forward is found by slowing down.
The Catcher in the Rye was published on this date in 1951. It is J.D. Salinger's only novel Salinger's only novel, and it's one of the most banned books in American history. After its publication, Salinger lived his life as a recluse, avoiding publicity and declining offers from film makers for the story. If you've read it, you know the text is everything. One has to slow down in order to “get it.”
Today is the 78th anniversary of the Trinity Test, in 1945, when the first ever atomic bomb was detonated at White Sands Proving Ground in Alamogordo, New Mexico, starting the nuclear age. The week will also bring us the Christopher Nolan film Oppenheimer about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist who helped develop that first nuclear weapon. Unfortunately, nuclear weapons are not an artifact of the past, and their effects are still present for many communities today . . . As is so often the case, the people who have borne the heaviest burden of these activities are often people of color, Indigenous communities, children, and those living in poor, rural communities. Nuclear weapons and the harm they've caused are very much a present-day problem and it's up to us to ensure a better future – (Union of Concerned Scientists email0
Clare of Assisi was born on this date in 1191. The Italian saint was one of the first followers of Saint Francis of Assisi.