the voice of your eyes

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond

by e.e. cummings



somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near


your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skillfully, mysteriously) her first rose


or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;


nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals the power of your intense fragility:  whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing


(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

---------------------------------

-30-

often astonished

----------------------- [excerpt:  Emma, by Jane Austen] -------------------------- "Open the windows!--but surely, Mr. Churchill, nobody would think of opening the windows at Randalls.  Nobody could be so imprudent!  I never heard of such a thing.  Dancing with open windows!--I am sure, neither your father nor Mrs. Weston (poor Miss Taylor that was) would suffer it."

     "Ah! Sir--but a thoughtless young person will sometimes step behind a window-curtain, and throw up a sash, without its being suspected.  I have often known it done myself."

     "Have you indeed, sir?--Bless me!  I never could have supposed it.  But I live out of the world, and am often astonished at what I hear. ..."


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     Words cannot express how much I am going to miss -- am already missing -- Chris Matthews' show, "Hardball."  It's like a death -- or, a grieving process for me.  I think about it at odd moments.  It's bizarre.  I am bereft.


     I think before "Hardball," back in the Nineties, he had another show that was on CNBC -- that's when I started watching him, I'm guessing -- cannot specifically remember...
     But feel like it's been more than 20 years.

          In this century, I even stopped watching him for several years, because even I got exasperated by something he said -- think I wrote about it on this blog, in 09 or 0-10, or whatever...


     But then recently, or a couple of years ago -- I don't know -- I watched Hardball again and I felt like, "Where-you-been-Chris-Matthews-I-love-your-style!!"



     One of the criticisms of his show that you hear most often is, "He interrupts his guests when they're talking!"


     The way I see it, there were two reasons for the interruptions, and they were both good reasons.

1) Guests will just start meandering if you let them keep going, and it was more important to Matthews to pack as much information and as many perspectives into the 40 minutes as possible.  

He wasn't cutting them off in a "mean" way, to shout-down their opinions or points of view -- he was just trying to deliver to me, the viewer, as much info as possible.  I could not take a position against that.

And - 2), Some guests -- more often years ago than now -- would be on the show with the purpose of promoting a book they'd written, and Chris didn't want them to get off on a tangent of selling their book, when his priority is to inform the audience.  Mention your book that's coming out, sure, but don't go on and on, don't use up too much time on it.

He did not even use much time promoting his own books.

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-30-

...I live out of the world, and am often astonished at what I hear

     Today I kind of feel like I'm at a funeral:  I was blindsided last night when I tapped up "Hardball with Chris Matthews" on my android tablet and he came on there and quit his job.  Retired on the spot.

     ...Well -- that was weird.

     Skimming articles online they mentioned someone named Bassett in a GQ article had said Mr. Matthews was -- bad, or something, and I was horrified / incredulous -- "He was pickin' on Angela Bassett??!!"





       Turned out it was someone else with the same last name...

     This is somewhat hard to get my mind around.


     Say it ain't so - !

-30-

put my guns in the ground

Mama, take this badge off of me

I can't use it anymore

It's gettin' dark, too dark for me to see

I feel like I'm knockin' on heaven's door


Knock, knock, knockin' on heaven's door
Knock, knock, knockin' on heaven's door
Knock, knock, knockin' on heaven's door
Knock, knock, knockin' on heaven's door


Mama, put my guns in the ground
I can't shoot them anymore
That long black cloud is comin' down
I feel like I'm knockin' on heaven's door


Knock, knock, knockin' on heaven's door
Knock, knock, knockin' on heaven's door
Knock, knock, knockin' on heaven's door
Knock, knock, knockin' on heaven's door

---------------------------------------

{"Knockin' On Heaven's Door," written by Bob Dylan}

-30-

a cacophony of meditations

music

songs

dances

cliffs

clouds

positive

negative

scary

dumb

crazy

full of grace

a cloudy, foggy day for getting cozy and reading a mystery

cat purrs

bicycle down to the pond

new ideas embedded in routines

-30-

writing down everything on the Internet

     I'm still learning to become accustomed to having the variety of the Internet at my fingertips.  

     I find something I enjoy watching, or want to watch / listen to -- on You Tube, Netflix, or Amazon Prime -- and then I start thinking, You know, I don't have time for it all now -- but I don't want to forget about it, when it's something I value -- how can I hold all this information in my head?

     I took a blank spiral notebook and started making a note of videos, movies, series (zez) ...

Jazz -- Amazon Prime

The Curse Of The Jade Scorpion - Amazon Prime

Take The Money And Run -- You Tube

...

-30-

wake the nation

------------------------- [excerpt from Hunter Thompson's Fear And Loathing:  On The Campaign Trail '72] -------------------------- 

After months of quasi-public brooding on the Whys and Wherefores of the disastrous beating he absorbed last November, McGovern seems finally to have bought the Conventional Wisdom -- 

that his campaign was doomed from the start:  

conceived in a fit of hubris, born in a momentary power-vacuum that was always more mirage than reality, borne along on a tide of frustration churned up by liberal lint-heads and elitist malcontents in the Eastern Media Establishment, and finally bashed into splinters on the reefs of at least two basic political realities that no candidate with good sense would ever have tried to cross in the first place.... To wit:

(1) Any incumbent President is unbeatable, except in a time of mushrooming national crisis or a scandal so heinous -- and with such obvious roots in the White House -- as to pose a clear and present danger to the financial security and/or physical safety of millions of voters in every corner of the country.

(2) The "mood of the nation," in 1972, was so overwhelmingly vengeful, greedy, bigoted and blindly reactionary that no presidential candidate who even faintly reminded "typical voters" of the fear & anxiety they'd felt during the 

constant "social upheavals" of the Sixties 

had any chance at all of beating Nixon last year -- not even Ted Kennedy -- because the "pendulum effect" that began with Nixon's slim victory in '68 was totally irreversible by 1972. ----------------------- [end, excerpt]

________________________________

Let! - The river run!

Let all the dreamers

Wake the nation

Come, the New Jerusalem

Sil - ver cities rise
The morning lights,
The streets that meet them,
And sirens call them on -- 
With a song --



On You Tube, type in 

let the river run 

------------------ "Let The River Run" by Carly Simon will probably come up right at the top with 9.3M views:

PLAY


...It's asking for the taking --
Trembling, shaking --
Oh, my heart is aching!

We're coming to the edge,
Running on the water,
Coming through the fog
Your sons and daughters


We -- the great and small --

Stand on a star

And blaze a trail of desire

Through the dark'ning dawn...


It's asking -- for the taking
Come, run with me now,
The sky is the color of blue
You've never even seen
In the eyes of your lover --

Oh, my heart is aching --

We're coming to the edge!
Running on the water!
Coming through the fog,
Your sons and daughters!...

Let -- the river run (the river run)...

-30-