Which semi-precious gemstone has the silliest name?

@bleedmichigan So she loves you more because you can waste more of your valuable resources? What a high Mehntenance golddigger she must be.

My wife values me more because of my frugal prowess. She gets wet thinking about how much money I save buying all this crap from Meh.

Post-Meh sex is the best. In for 3.

@bleedmichigan

Good grief indeed. That’s all I’m going to say. Anything else would be mean. I’m trying not to be mean.

Okay, damnit, if I must:

1. If your SO wants to kill you (even metaphorically) over this trivial shit, you’ve got much bigger problems.
2. My wife has been emphatic about not buying into all of that money-wasting bullshit. The jewelry industry thanks you. Fuck the jewelry industry and Madison Avenue, and most of capitalist consumerist, materialist America.
3. I don’t recall that our sex life has ever been improved by either of us wasting money or hindered by saving it. I’m sorry for your loss.
4. We tend to purchase this sort of thing together and neither of us is particularly moved by the monetary cost of a gesture, because, well, price doesn’t directly correlate with quality, beauty, significance, et al. We like what we like; sometimes it’s costly, sometimes it isn’t. She has an expensive (and we both agree, overpriced) rock on her finger because she likes it. But a lot of her other favorite jewelry–in fact, I’d have to say the next most favorite piece she has, that she just received yesterday–is probably cheap as fuck. And she doesn’t really care either way.

But, you know, if you want to live in the 50s, I guess you can say that a lot of this dumbass country agrees with you.

/image sugar daddy

@awk
And this, because Yeats is a god.

Lapis Lazuli

by William Butler Yeats

I have heard that hysterical women say
They are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow,
Of poets that are always gay,
For everybody knows or else should know
That if nothing drastic is done
Aeroplane and Zeppelin will come out,
Pitch like King Billy bomb-balls in
Until the town lie beaten flat.

All perform their tragic play,
There struts Hamlet, there is Lear,
That’s Ophelia, that Cordelia;
Yet they, should the last scene be there,
The great stage curtain about to drop,
If worthy their prominent part in the play,
Do not break up their lines to weep.
They know that Hamlet and Lear are gay;
Gaiety transfiguring all that dread.
All men have aimed at, found and lost;
Black out; Heaven blazing into the head:
Tragedy wrought to its uttermost.
Though Hamlet rambles and Lear rages,
And all the drop scenes drop at once
Upon a hundred thousand stages,
It cannot grow by an inch or an ounce.

On their own feet they came, or on shipboard,
Camel-back, horse-back, ass-back, mule-back,
Old civilisations put to the sword.
Then they and their wisdom went to rack:
No handiwork of Callimachus
Who handled marble as if it were bronze,
Made draperies that seemed to rise
When sea-wind swept the corner, stands;
His long lamp chimney shaped like the stem
Of a slender palm, stood but a day;
All things fall and are built again
And those that build them again are gay.

Two Chinamen, behind them a third,
Are carved in Lapis Lazuli,
Over them flies a long-legged bird
A symbol of longevity;
The third, doubtless a serving-man,
Carries a musical instrument.

Every discolouration of the stone,
Every accidental crack or dent
Seems a water-course or an avalanche,
Or lofty slope where it still snows
Though doubtless plum or cherry-branch
Sweetens the little half-way house
Those Chinamen climb towards, and I
Delight to imagine them seated there;
There, on the mountain and the sky,
On all the tragic scene they stare.
One asks for mournful melodies;
Accomplished fingers begin to play.
Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes,
Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay.

@joelmw WB get’s bonus points for liberal use of the word “gay”.

@joelmw

Damn you. Damn you

Have some more.

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

@joelmw

Of course, he was not, could not have been, a god, or anything like it.

But he would have made a poem, I hope, upon encountering the idea in another.

I understand. Thx.

(I posted this one in my Dec2016 Goat thread, but I don’t think the universe will collapse if I do a repeat.)

In Memory of W B Yeats

W H Auden
1939

I

He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.

But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.

What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

II

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry 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, a mouth.

III

Earth, receive an honored guest;
William Yeats is laid to rest:
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.

Time that is intolerant
Of the brave and innocent,
And indifferent in a week
To a beautiful physique,

Worships language and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives,
Pardons cowardice, conceit,
Lays its honors at their feet.

Time that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well.

In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate.

Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice.

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress.

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountains start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

@f00l I don’t have any special feelings for Innisfree or, really, any great fondness (no distaste, but no singular fondness) for the themes of the poem itself, but I do find it one of the most perfect ever in terms of its sound and the way that it’s fitted together; and quite often that first line runs through my head for no other apparent reason than that it’s cadence moves me.

Yeats is probably my second favorite poet, and I think he had a better overall mastery of the craft than my favorite, Blake (whom I adore for several other reasons). But both are occultists, dabbling in the most essential elements of reality, committed to the idea that art holds the key to accessing those hidden truths.

One of my best college experiences was a graduate level seminar I took that focused on both of them. This was the class for which I perfected what’s become my preferred hermeneutical method of holding open the Bible, a worthy poem and my favorite lyrics and seeing what it is they all have to say to each other, to me and to the unsuspecting world.

@f00l The Auden is nice, but it–with its direct and implicit dismissals and resignation–brings the following to mind, of which I’ll excerpt a kernel (but you should read and ponder it all of course):

Then nowise worship dusty deeds,
Nor seek, for this is also sooth,
To hunger fiercely after truth
etc. etc. . . .
For words alone are certain good:
. . . .
The wandering earth herself may be
Only a sudden flaming word,
In clanging space a moment heard,
Troubling the endless reverie.

The Song of the Happy Shepherd

by William Butler Yeats

The woods of Arcady are dead,
And over is their antique joy;
Of old the world on dreaming fed;
Grey Truth is now her painted toy;
Yet still she turns her restless head:
But O, sick children of the world,
Of all the many changing things
In dreary dancing past us whirled,
To the cracked tune that Chronos sings,
Words alone are certain good.
Where are now the warring kings,
Word be-mockers? — By the Rood
Where are now the warring kings?
An idle word is now their glory,
By the stammering schoolboy said,
Reading some entangled story:
The kings of the old time are dead;
The wandering earth herself may be
Only a sudden flaming word,
In clanging space a moment heard,
Troubling the endless reverie.

Then nowise worship dusty deeds,
Nor seek, for this is also sooth,
To hunger fiercely after truth,
Lest all thy toiling only breeds
New dreams, new dreams; there is no truth
Saving in thine own heart. Seek, then,
No learning from the starry men,
Who follow with the optic glass
The whirling ways of stars that pass —
Seek, then, for this is also sooth,
No word of theirs — the cold star-bane
Has cloven and rent their hearts in twain,
And dead is all their human truth.
Go gather by the humming sea
Some twisted, echo-harbouring shell,
And to its lips thy story tell,
And they thy comforters will be,
Rewarding in melodious guile
Thy fretful words a little while,
Till they shall singing fade in ruth
And die a pearly brotherhood;
For words alone are certain good:
Sing, then, for this is also sooth.

I must be gone: there is a grave
Where daffodil and lily wave,
And I would please the hapless faun,
Buried under the sleepy ground,
With mirthful songs before the dawn.
His shouting days with mirth were crowned;
And still I dream he treads the lawn,
Walking ghostly in the dew,
Pierced by my glad singing through,
My songs of old earth’s dreamy youth:
But ah! she dreams not now; dream thou!
For fair are poppies on the brow:
Dream, dream, for this is also sooth.

@joelmw

what’s become my preferred hermeneutical method of holding open the Bible, a worthy poem and my favorite lyrics and seeing what it is they all have to say to each other, to me and to the unsuspecting world.

Damn it, I want to see or hear this musing live, in action, bouncing off all thought and all conceit.

Dammit dammit.

I need this.

hermeneutical

It’s been a long time for me, encountering that words elsewhere besides big fat books.

Pardon me if I go sideways toward pop cultures re for a min:

Its been a long time…

Funny how we can find ways to resurrect the immediate and strong relevance of the fascinations of student days.

Or perhaps the relevance finds us.

Could great thoughts and concepts possess a degree of consciousness and intention within our minds, all of their own creation?

I only read the first reply of yours, so far.

I’ll come back for the Yeats and Blake, and more. Right now, I have to pretend to go be somewhat practically useful to the human universe for a while.

Thanks.

The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.

I will take what I can get. What I am capable of reaching for.

One of the great human quests is to continually increase one’s capacity for reaching and for gratitude; and one’s deepening understanding of the reasons therefore and thereby;

@f00l This is what I think of when I hear the words “been a long time” (not quite the recording I remember, but about the right place chronologically):

@f00l Alas, I’m not sure if my method has quite the same oomph it used to, when each new discovery (or concoction) seemed like a goddamned theophany and would light me up for days. But perhaps there’s wisdom in my tempered enthusiasms. And I still get fired up–though less by revelation than by an urgency for Justice and to see us humans applying even the most basic of truths. I believed more then in certitude and in the odd notion that when the truth is properly expressed one cannot but align with it.

On lingering relevance: I’ve heard it said a thousand different ways that we never escape what we learn in our youth. And indeed so much of “maturity” amounts to casting aside credulity (which we use overwhelming as a negative word, but I’m keeping it here), curiosity, faith, hope. I’m happy to hold on to what I learned, as I don’t think I’ve ever seen it fully realized yet outside my mind. You can take that however you want.

At the same time, I like to think that I’m still exploring, learning, open and available, and it feels like my world is turned upside down on an appropriately regular (and frequent) basis.

Remarrying (separated by death, not divorce, from my first wife), leaving the church of my youth, getting more involved in social justice have all helped in that regard. I generally don’t spend too much time with folks my age either, generally preferring younger, still rebellious souls.

@huja well I mean technically the precious ones are also pretty worthless… cough diamonds cough

@thismyusername You get a gold star

@thismyusername They aren’t worthless, they have an intrinsic value due to their hardness. Some of the gemstones I work with are too fragile or soft to set in rings, for example. And of course diamonds have lots of industrial uses. They’re just really worth only a fraction of their sales price.

@lancewilder
/giphy jasper