Reflections from a blank page . . .

It's the Moon's day and cooling Northerlies bring songs from the mailbox . . .

Today is the anniversary of The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963.

The poet Rita Dove was born today in 1952 Akron, Ohio. The Pulitzer Prize recipient, she has also served as U.S. Poet Laureate.

from “Dawn Revisited”

Imagine you wake up / with a second chance . . .If you don't look back,

the future never happens. / . . . The whole sky is yours / to write on, blown open /

to a blank page. – Rita Dove, On the Bus with Rosa Parks. W. W. Norton and Company, Inc. 1999.

Today is also the 274th anniversary of Goethe's birth. Born Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in 1749 Frankfurt, he is considered the father of German literature as the author of the epic drama Faust.

. . . while poetry may be a language for the silent places in us, it is also a language of connection — a way of finding the intimate in the universal and the universal in the intimate — and so it is meant to be shared. – Maria Popova, in The Marginalian.

Black Print on a White Page

While it may seem I am addicted to words,

it's not the words I am drawn too.

Rather, I write to find those blank spaces

between the words where the light is.

The pain and consequent fear of abandonment

has led to my now aloneness

and the discovery of the love-light

reflected from a blank page.

– jb 8.27.23

Stop making sense

On this Satyr's day in TulseyTown breezes have shifted to Northerlies clearing the mailbox save for these three items:

[Too many] feel that society has let them down, and they can’t ask anything of it, and they can’t put their hopes on anything outside themselves. . .retreating to a life in which they think only of their own satisfaction, and maybe the satisfaction of their revenge against society. But the life that no longer trusts another human being and no longer forms ties to the political community is not a human life any longer. – Martha Nussbaum in The Marginalian

Days spent trying to make sense of the (Watercourse) can lead to confusion between turbulence and human tribulation. We are here to be curious not consoled. . . .The world becomes only what it is, the flow of an unfathomable river. – Jim Harrison

We are about one month away from the re-release in theatres of a restored 4k video of the Talking Heads famous film “Stop Making Sense.” This fall will mark the event’s 40th anniversary.

Reinventing the rant

It's Freya's day and the mailbox here in TulseyTown is almost too hot to touch. Committed as I am to sharing yet more flotsam and jetsam from the stream, I bravely venture forth:

The U.S Poet Laureate Charles Wright was born today in 1935 Pickwick Dam, Tennessee.

Keillor continues, at long last, with revelations of political preferences: Out with the old, in with the young.

Many of us who are engaged with the world experience discouragement regularly. . . it’s all too easy to let ourselves spiral downward. The first step in pulling yourself up is to notice and acknowledge when you’re going unconscious. – Pema Chödrön (new link)

One can't speak of consiousness without considering the unconsious, perhaps Freudian perspectives of Id, Ego, and Superego – on full display in this fabulous interview (by Mary Elizabeth Williams) with Eddie Izzard on the eve of another reinvention of him/her self.

– from Southern Cross, by Charles Wright. Random House. 1981,

It’s 1936, in Tennessee. I’m one
And spraying the dead grass with a hose.
The curtains blow in and out.

And then it’s not. I’m not and they’re not.

Or it’s 1941 in a brown suit, or ’53 in its white shoes,
Overlay after overlay tumbled and brought back,
As meaningless as the sea would be
           if the sea could remember its waves . . .