More or Less Mad for Similar Reasons

POEM (I lived in the first century of world wars)

Muriel Rukeyser

I lived in the first century of world wars.

Most mornings I would be more or less insane,

The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,

The news would pour out of various devices

Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.

I would call my friends on other devices;

They would be more or less mad for similar reasons.

Slowly I would get to pen and paper,

Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.

In the day I would be reminded of those men and women,

Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,

Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.

As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,

We would try to imagine them, try to find each other,

To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile

Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,

Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means

To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,

To let go the means, to wake.

I lived in the first century of these wars.

* Muriel Rukeyser, born 106 years ago today, this poem written in 1968

   

       

• Amazing the coincidence, Corbyn’s crushing, flopping impeachment, Hillary’s !Me! !Dammit! !Me! docuhagiography. The odds*
• Analogy fallacy, Britain 2019 v US 2020
• The strange death of Social-Democratic England, with the obvious note that anyone who criticizes American imperialism is tagged anti-Semitic
• Anti-politics & the last gasp of British Labourism
• Today's essential duh: America's Two-Headed One Party System
• Two-headed one party system
• UPDATE! Link below fixed (thanks Rob and 6GP):
• The coincidence of trauma and therapy, alarm and comfort, is the essence of today’s news, which requires emergency, high-stakes drama, breaking stories, updates, and alerts to keep its audience engaged, but which must then solve the problem it has created by offering explainers and analyses to give coherence to so much terrifying chaos and by employing informational docents, in the form of likable media figures, to soothe our fear of a world on fire with their good humor, their intelligence, and the reassuring whisper embedded in their format: the news exists so it can disappear. And the news does disappear, inevitably, because its salience in the virtual sphere of our apprehension is so disproportionate to its salience in our lives. But what does not disappear is the residue of the experience and how this primes us for our next encounter with news of politics and the world out there.
• The real charge against Corbyn is that he fundamentally believes that British/white lives are of equal value with the lives of others
• Labrexit
• How Boris won
• How our sociopath leaders scrub their image (that this is WSJ is The Fuck)
• Your Fucking Washington Post 
• Maggie's weekly links 
• Up on the roof
• *Stolen from me from a private twitter conversation with the above Friday night
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links 
• Revising Emily Dickinson
• Theme Song December 2019

SONG FOR DEAD CHILDREN

Muriel Rukeyser

We set great wreaths of brightness on the graves of the passionate

who required tribute of hot July flowers—

for you, O brittle-hearted, we bring offering

remembering how your wrists were thin and your delicate bones

not yet braced for conquering.

  

The sharp cries of ghost-boys are keen above the meadows,

and little girls continue graceful and wondering.

Flickering evening on the lakes recalls those young

heirs whose developing years have sunk to earth,

their strength not tested, their praise unsung.

  

Weave grasses for their childhood—who will never see

love or disaster or take sides against decay

balancing the choices of maturity.

Silent and coffined in silence while we pass

loud in defiance of death, the helpless lie.