Sunday, July 31, 2011

WITH ME ~






Jimmy Dale Gilmore


Jimmy Dale Gilmore is a Taurus born in the Panhandle of Texas in 1945 (Amarillo) and raised in Lubbock. Same neighborhood as Roy Orbison and Buddy Holly (with Alabaman Hank Williams thrown in for good measure) and one could say Gilmore is their grandchild. Give a listen to his haunting tenor voice. When not appearing solo, or with his son Colin, or with The Flatlanders (Joe Ely and Butch Hancock) which has been a world all its own with these three musicians since 1972, Gilmore lives in Austin. He appeared in the bowling alley scene of the Coen brothers film The Big Lebowski as the sweet pacifist soul "Smoky."










nodepression.com




Friday, July 29, 2011

EARTH ~


(spinner)











happy b'day
29 july 2011
sweetheart

film © bob arnold

Wednesday, July 27, 2011

1930 ~ 1950





Ludwig Wittgenstein




It is a great temptation to try to make the spirit explicit.



A confession has to be a part of your new life.



If you use a trick in logic, whom can you be tricking other than yourself?



In my artistic activities I really have nothing but good manners.



The way to solve the problem you see in life is to live in a way that will make
what is problematic disappear.
The fact that life is problematic shows that the shape of your life does not fit
into life's mould. So you must change the way you live and, once your life
does fit into the mould, what is problematic will disappear.
But don't we have the feeling that someone who sees no problem in life is
blind to something important, even to the most important thing of all? Don't I
feel like saying that a man like that is just living aimlessly — blindly, like a
mole, and that if only he could see, he would see the problem?
Or shouldn't I say rather: a man who lives rightly won't experience the
problem as sorrow, so for him it will not be a problem, but a joy rather; in
other words for him it will be a bright halo round his life, not a dubious
background.



If I am thinking about a topic just for myself and not with a view to writing a
book, I jump about all round it; that is the only way of thinking that comes
naturally to me. Forcing my thoughts into an ordered sequence is a torment
for me. Is it even worth attempting now?
I squander an unspeakable amount of effort making an arrangement of my
thoughts which may have no value at all.



The origin and the primitive form of language game is a reaction; only
from this can more complicated forms develop.
Language — I want to say — is refinement, 'in the beginning was the deed'.


Nobody can truthfully say of himself that he is filth. Because if I do say it, though it
can be true in a sense, this is not a truth by which I myself can be penetrated:
otherwise I should either have to go mad or change myself.



You cannot write anything about yourself that is more truthful than you
yourself are. That is the difference between writing about yourself and
writing about external objects. You write about yourself from your own
height. You don't stand on sti;ts or on a ladder but on your bare feet.



Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.



In philosophy the winner of the race is the one who can run most slowly. Or:
the one who gets there last.



No one can speak the truth; if he has still not mastered himself. He cannot speak
it; — but not because he is not clever enough yet.
The truth can be spoken only by someone who is already at home in it; not
by someone who still lives in falsehood and reaches out from falsehood
towards truth on just one occasion.



One of the most important methods I use is to imagine a historical
development for our ideas different from what actually occurred. If we do this
we see the problem from a completely new angle.



Aim at being loved without being admired.



Don't take the example of others as your guide, but nature!



A philosopher is a man who has to cure many intellectual diseases in himself
before he can arrive at the notions of common sense.



What's ragged should be left ragged.



When I came home I expected a surprise and there was no surprise for me,
so, of course, I was surprised.



The thought working its way towards the light.



Madness need not be regarded as an illness. Why shouldn't it be seen as a
sudden — more or less sudden — change of character?



Wisdom is cold and to that extent stupid. (Faith on the other hand is a
passion.) It might also be said: Wisdom merely conceals life from you.
(Wisdom is like cold grey ash, covering up the glowing embers.)



Just as I cannot write verse, so too my ability to write prose extends only so far,
and no farther. There is quite definite limit to the prose I can write and I can
no more overstep that than I can write a poem. This is the nature of my
equipment; and it is the only equipment I have. It's as though someone were
to say: In this game I can only attain such and such a degree of perfection, I can't
go beyond it.



Even the most refined taste has nothing to do with creative power.



When you are philosophizing you have to descend into primeval chaos and
feel at home there.



Where others go ahead, I stay in one place.



Ambition is the death of thought.



One age misunderstands another; and a petty age misunderstands all the others
in its own nasty way.



LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
Culture and Value
translated by Peter Winch
(Chicago)


Tuesday, July 26, 2011

EARTH ~




Westward Ho!






photo © bob arnold




Monday, July 25, 2011

EARTH ~





Fats Domino










UPI Photo/Ezio Petersen



WITH ME ~





norway island




there are
barely



any
words



left
after



so many
child-



ren
murdered












to those
utoya island
norway



Sunday, July 24, 2011

Saturday, July 23, 2011

READERS ~













On the whole, I must say, I have found better men — better in every sense of the word — among the uncultured than among the cultured ones of the world. The most monstrous crimes against humanity are being committed every day by those who have had all the advantages of learning. By making people more literate, more book conscious, we can hardly say that we are thereby making better citizens of them.


A book is no better than, and usually not as good as a rock, a tree, a creature of the wild, a wisp of cloud, a wave, or a shadow on the wall. We who make books are indebted not to books but to the things which impel men to write books: earth, air, fire and water. If there were not a common source from which author and reader alike draw, there would be no books. Would it be such a calamity, a world without books? Could we not still communicate our joys, our discoveries, by word of mouth? Falling back on the tongue, there would be no need to destroy whole forests, mar the landscape, befoul the air, or dull the minds and bodies of those who toil to provide us with mental and spiritual fodder in the form of books.

Henry Miller

from - "To Read or Not To Read"
Stand Still Like the Hummingbird
New Directions, 1962

















father & son photographs over the years taken by the quiet hand of the household

photos above © susan arnold





henry miller



Friday, July 22, 2011

EARTH ~

( phoebe )











film ©
bob arnold



Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Tuesday, July 19, 2011

A MOMENT ~







Happily I was streaming C-Span and caught this moment Live, not having a television.

Three cheers, of course, for fellows always in flannel shirts.

And cheers as well for protective wives — Wendi Deng (Ms. Rupert Murdoch) who leapt up, in pink jacket, and got in a good slap on the patriot, Jonathan May-Bowles.

I'd call it a tie.








buster keaton with custard pies



EARTH ~




Billy Batman & Kirby Doyle




Poem To A Mountain Girl




Slowly, past this day, you sleep
and as you lightly breathe a river burns from me...
all the final voices forever said —


and in your sleep I awake, here,
have eaten an orange,
have gone to the creek and bathed
listening to its thin and liquid speech,
its joy to run so free and clean.


Now, returning to this ragged tent,
sanctuary to your sleep, your real sleep,
I wish for your waking
so that we together could take cool pause
at the hidden pond I found downstream,
our bodies quick and chilled by the water,
our bodies breathing — holding.


Now, here as pen point and shadow
touch this page
I look up almost stunned to
know that from your sleep you have loved me,
and from my awakening I have loved you back.


. . .


Karma
karman; Sanskrit; action —
root — KR, "to act"
Am I flower
--to be fancied of
clouds —
--this pure staring of
faces?
--Am I so overheated
I fume the angels,
the very choirs themselves?
I may speak of angels,
may I not,
for they speak of me —
The gates of Pan's gardens are
never closed


. . .


Come lover light
in my dawn —
come lover dawn
to my bedded cheek
come light in my dawn —


step across me
so that scent of hem
and any flower
that thou art
brings me to the
window to bless thy
leaving till
darkness brings
thee to haunt me.


Come dawn lover
to window rise
thy voice in darkest
dawn —
come upon me
by mountain shine
by quickest beam of
early light, the
sun!
thy lover ever
come down in me.
Hand me by moan
thy face in faintest
air
that kiss
abd breath still
upon me —
with heart within
my head
and my eyes to win
thee —
Come dawn lover
and light in me.


Man mourns
that which he is
and loves that which he is not.
His lover must always
come endlessly
from our eternity;
come flowing as a special
message of you and me.
O come down
dawn lover —
thy one love
upon all is our need.
O come down lover on
we


. .


from the silent world


It is the morning
I eat for breakfast
that yellow meal
of corn within
a white crock bowl —


O foods of my soul,
the wind that scatters
the near spirits
through the trees,
the wind that moves
processionally our ancestors
moves through me.



. . .


from Lyric Poems
(City Lights 1988)








A TRUE BLUE SAN FRANCISCO POET WHO WAS BORN IN SAN FRANCISCO (1932-2003 ). HIS FIRST BOOK OF POEMS WAS SAPPHOBONES (POETS HOUSE, 1966). HE ALSO WROTE PROSE ~ HAPPINESS BASTARD ( 1968) ~ LIKE JACK KEROUAC'S ON THE ROAD, THE TEXT WAS COMPOSED ON ONE CONTINUOUS SCROLL ON A TYPEWRITER. THOSE THAT KNEW HIM NEVER FORGOT HIM; THE REST OF THE WORLD GETS THE UNFORGETTABLE POEMS.



Monday, July 18, 2011

WITH ME ~
(feel that sultry heat; it's a ray charles day)















Sunday, July 17, 2011

MOONISH ~









frank sinatra




BACK ROAD CHALKIE ~











photo © bob arnold




EARTH ~






a sunny sunday







photo © bob arnold



Saturday, July 16, 2011

EARTH ~





Adonis ( Ali Ahmad Said Esber )




CELEBRATING CHILDHOOD


Even the wind wants
to become a cart
pulled by butterflies.



I remember madness
leaning for the first time
on the mind's pillow.
I was talking to my body then
and my body was an idea
I wrote in red.



Red is the sun's most beautiful throne
and all the other colors
worship on red rugs.



Night is another candle.
In every branch, an arm,
a message carried in space
echoed by the body of the wind.



The sun insists on dressing itself in fog
when it meets me:
Am I being scolded by the light?



Oh, my past days —
they used to walk in their sleep
and I used to lean on them.



Love and dreams are two parentheses.
Between them I place my body
and discover the world.



Many times
I saw the air fly with two grass feet
and the road dance with feet made of air.



My wishes are flowers
staining my days.



I was wounded early,
and early I learned
that wounds made me.



I still follow the child
who still walks inside me.



Now he stands at a staircase made of light
searching for a corner to rest in
and to read the face of night again.



If the moon were a house,
my feet would refuse to touch its doorstep.



They are taken by dust
carrying me to the air of seasons.



I walk,
one hand in the air,
the other caressing tresses
that I imagine.



A star is also
a pebble in the field of space.



He alone
who is joined to the horizon
can build new roads.



A moon, an old man,
his seat is night
and light is his walking stick.



What shall I say to the body I abandoned
in the rubble of the house
in which I was born?
No one can narrate my childhood
except those stars that flicker above it
and that leave footprints
on the evening path.



My childhood is still
being born in the psalms of a light
whose name I do not know
and who names me.



Out of that river he made a mirror
and asked it about his sorrow.
He made rain out of his grief
and imitated the clouds.



Your childhood is a village.
You will never cross its boundaries
no matter how far you go.



His days are lakes,
his memories floating bodies.



You who are descending
from the mountains of the past,
how can you climb them again,
and why?



Time is a door
I cannot open.
My magic is worn,
my chants asleep.



I was born in a village,
small and secretive like a womb.
I never left it.
I love the ocean not the shores.



ADONIS
Selected Poems
(Yale/Margellos, 2010)
translated from the Arabic by Khaled Mattawa





Poet, philosopher and essayist born in Qasabin Syria in 1930.
From seventeen adopted the pseudonym Adonis.
He is considered the epitome of contemporary Arabic poetry.




Friday, July 15, 2011

EARTH ~



CELEBRATING DEATH



Death arrives from the back
even when it comes before us.
Only life confronts.



The eye is a road
and the road is an intersection.



A child plays with life,
an old man leans on it.



The tongue rusts from excess of speech,
and the eye dries from lack of dreams.



Wrinkles —
grooves on the face,
potholes in the heart.



A body — half doorstep,
half incline.



His head is a butterfly
with a single wing.



The sky reads you
after death writes you.



The sky has two breasts;
from them all people suckle
every moment, every place.



The human being is a book
life reads continuously,
and death reads in an instant,
and only once.



What about this city?
In it dawn appears like a walking stick
in a darkness named Time.



Spring came to the garden of the house,
laid down his suitcases
and started giving them to the trees
under a rain falling from his arms.
Why is the poet always mistaken?
Spring gives him its leaves
and he gives them to ink.



Our existence is a slope
and we live to climb it.



I congratulate you, sand.
You are the only one who can pour
water and mirage
into the same bowl.



ADONIS
Selected Poems
(Yale/Margellos, 2010)
translated from the Arabic by Khaled Mattawa





Poet, philosopher and essayist born in Qasabin Syria in 1930.
From seventeen adopted the pseudonym Adonis.
He is considered the epitome of contemporary Arabic poetry.
HE WAS A POET ~






Roberts Blossom

March 25, 1924-8 July 2011


Thursday, July 14, 2011

BIOMETRICS ~

(will make sure we are all prisoners)





The Look of Love



VISITOR ~










film © bob arnold





Wednesday, July 13, 2011

EARTH ~












democracynow.org



Tuesday, July 12, 2011

EARTH ~










photo © bob arnold