I’ve got it all here in my head
There’s nothing more needs to be said
I’m just bangin’ on my old piano
I’m getting in tune with the straight and narrow

– The Who

Max Ernst: Cocktail Drinker

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the question forgets the thousand implications
the only concern is this single handle to the mind
to connect the words into a taut, sharp formation
breathing only to invoke the voice, and its sound
because all answers must come from somewhere
even a lie has its logic, though the truth, principle
to satisfy the upturned phrase, please or deny

Effort itself is a gift.

The Fisherman

In an old land far off, a salty sea churned beyond the shores. There was a man who fished the waters out in that sea. Every day he woke before dawn, in darkness setting out, out into that broad expanse, casting his nets all day, and when he waited (between the time when he let the nets out and pulled them back in), he dreamed. He dreamed with his eyes wide open, understanding that they were only dreams and nothing but the air of his mind. He dreamed of never having to wake before dawn to set out to the ocean, never to need to cast his nets out and pull them in, that he lived far inland in a great mansion and that every need he had all he needed do was snap his fingers and they were done. He dreamed this every day.

The man had a wife, and he had a son, and he never talked to them about the dream he had. Time passed, he grew older, and his son grew up enough to bring out with him to fish. When he did this, the man had no time to dream his dream, because whenever he looked as if his eyes were drifting off, his son would ask him what he was thinking of. Embarrassed, he would always say that he was thinking of the boy’s mother. Then he would change the subject, and he and the boy would talk of this and that. As the days and weeks passed, the man felt a change come over him. He didn’t mind so much waking before dawn, going out to fish, because he had his son with him, and whenever he was about to float off into his dream, the boy would bring him back down, and they would talk of this thing and that.

One night he had a dream, but not that old one. That old dream had faded away by now. He dreamed he was out in the ocean with his son, and they were fishing. When his eyes started to drift away, his son asked him what he was thinking, and then they talked about this and that. And the fisherman couldn’t tell if he was dreaming or he was awake.

It is so easy to be proud. So easy to think that we deserve all the miracles that we are given. Exactly because we are given such great things that we think ourselves as great, the more we have, the more we forget that they were not our own hands that created them out of nothing. Truly, we are none of us worthy of life itself, an infinite gift packaged in a finite form. The eyes we look out of, the imaginations of childhood, the color and texture of a rose. I might pray that the Lord take away the wonders of the everyday, to give them again so that I might appreciate them, but then I know that given a short time afterwards, when I bask in comfort again, recovered from the pain of the previous loss — that I would forget. And wonder I, truly, how many countless things I take for granted, that we don’t notice the miracles every day because they come every day.

All angels, all saints, all the devils, all the world shall know all the deeds that ever thou didest, though thou have been shriven of them and contrite. But this knowledge shall be no shame to thee if that thou be saved, but rather a witness to God — right as we read of the deeds of Mary Magdalene [as] her witness to God and not to her reproof.

the effort is not sealed upon its completing, not yet
for any art is merely abandoned, never the ultimate
and dreams often drift through waking eyes, undone

We were moving mountains
Long before we knew we could

– Leon Jackson

Max Ernst
2 Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale

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Souls better than we have paid more and gotten less.

The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random between the profusion of matter and of the stars, but that within this prison we can draw from ourselves images powerful enough to deny our nothingness.
                – Andre Malraux

The one true measure of a successful adventure is returning home safely.
                – Ronald Polly

Search others for their virtue, and yourself for your vices.
                – Buckminster Fuller

True religion invites us to become better people. False religion tells us that this has already occurred.
                – Abdal-Hakim Murad

Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.
                – Gustav Mahler

Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.
                – Henri Bergson

If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.
                – Rene Descartes

I must wander away from here for a space. I foresee that what is to come in my life will leave little room for musings such as these that I write here. Perhaps I am wrong, and there will be time for asides, but I see not such skies ahead. I imagine will return, perhaps in a month’s time, or so, but at this moment, I must seize the opportunity of other endeavors, with full force press on into other areas. These dreams I dream I feel as if they are touching down to earth and reality, that I am a conduit of electric imaginations. And I do not know when exactly I shall return to these electronic halls, but I feel that there will be a time when it may be necessary for me to do so — a writer writes, after all. Even if it is not his primary mode. Therefore, not adieu, but au revoir. Till we meet again.

Do not lose heart. There is purpose in it all.

past the illusion, there is a pattern closing like a rose
the harmony of the spheres, whatever form the outcomes
unworthy am i to hear the music of eternity alight just so
though i believe more than sensibility ever dared explore
visions of hell once entertained my notion of all worlds
now is joy in my bones, expression of such to explode
protected by holy words, i step to the edge: of forever

[Book.]

Is it now as if a beast has been let loose in the world, the quake the breaking of its bonds, deep in the earth? It is as if all the colors are different. As if someone has added meaning behind all of them. Everything strikes me paradoxically as both surreal and somehow more real than it was before the great heaving. Myself, I am bewildered. As if I had had purpose before, and now it has left me — this is illusion, I am aware at some level, that no such purpose existed. Is it so big a change, this me, to the me that preceded the prayer? And yet I look to find some kind of bearing, and before… I felt like I needed not such a thing as direction to progress. I feel something is missing, now.

There’s a feeling I get
When I look to the west,
And my spirit is crying for leaving.
In my thoughts I have seen
Rings of smoke through the trees,
And the voices of those who standing looking.

– Led Zeppelin

Max Ernst: The Postman Cheval

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