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The Haughty Actor

AN actor - GIBBS, of Drury Lane -
Of very decent station,
Once happened in a part to gain
Excessive approbation:
It sometimes turns a fellow's brain
And makes him singularly vain
When he believes that he receives
Tremendous approbation.

His great success half drove him mad,
But no one seemed to mind him;
Well, in another piece he had
Another part assigned him.
This part was smaller, by a bit,
Than that in which he made a hit.
So, much ill-used, he straight refused
To play the part assigned him.

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poem by William Schwenck Gilbert
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Attention please! Attention please!

'Attention please! Attention please!
Don't dare to talk! Don't dare to sneeze!
Don't doze or daydream! Stay awake!
Your health, your very life's at stake!
Ho–ho, you say, they can't mean me.
Ha–ha, we answer, wait and see.

Did any of you ever meet
A child called Goldie Pinklesweet?
Who on her seventh birthday went
To stay with Granny down in Kent.
At lunchtime on the second day
Of dearest little Goldie's stay,
Granny announced, 'I'm going down
To do some shopping in the town.'
(D'you know why Granny didn't tell
The child to come along as well?
She's going to the nearest inn
To buy herself a double gin.)

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poem by Roald Dahl
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Some Thoughts on Post Modernism

Camus wrote The Stranger and The Plague his last book was the myth of Sisyphus, dealing with the absurdity of rolling a rock up a hill just to have it come back down at the top of the hill. He believed in trying but yet it was hard to find a definitive reason why in a propositional sense. What does it all mean in the midst of the absurd and 'benign indifference of the universe' his last words in The Stranger. How do we have a moral defense if there are no universals? How do we band together against 'The Plague' if our existentialism is so personal that we can back nothing in any dogmatic or religious sense?
The collective becomes a real problem as far as banning together to stand against tyranny and evil when individuality is so amorphous and undefined ethically and morally. When we claim there are no boundaries and we are 'beyond good and evil' it is difficult to make a unified stand.
When the subjective and personal doesn't have any standards that are ostensible it is difficult to move collectively. When the road has no instructions and there is no defined side to drive on it is easy to have problems. When your existentialism doesn't match with mine and there is no referee or standard we both accept how do we agree? ?
When social Darwinism refutes democracy and says' the strong survive' the weak perish' biology and natural selection is ruthless and bug eats bug and we as mammals are subject to these laws of nature, when 'love thy neighbor as thy self' and ' do on too others as you would have them do on too you' are looked at as spiritual maxims but are really not universals in nature, how do we say and define what is oppression, exploitation, and inhumanity with any real authority?
What makes 'might equals right' wrong when it is endorsed by natural law? ? How does ethical and moral authority survive when we really don't have a conscience? ? If a human being is 'atoms' bio-chemistry' molecules and the laws of physics' When he is nothing more or less than a material being subject to the laws of nature and he has a myth of conscience where does it stop and what and who gains the power? ? THE STATE, THE SUPERMAN, THE WILL TO POWER, Stalin, Hitler, Major corporations, Global economies, States with nuclear weapons!
We are in troubled times and past ideologies go hand in hand with how and why we got here. Camus, Sartre, Jaspers and many other not so well known existentialists owe there background from Soren Kierkegaard from Denmark who wrote against Hegel's collectivism and State power and was one of the first to really point out what Europe and western civilization was heading for with the new rationalism and definitions from the age of reason and the enlightenment. Faith and conscience go hand and hand and they both transcend organized religion and traditional institutions.
Kierkegaard died in 1855 right around the time Dostoevsky moved to St. Petersburg and started to write 'Notes from the Underground'. Dostoevsky fought the coming religions which he and Nietzsche both knew as 'political ideologies'. Marx and Engel's published the communist manifesto in 1847, six years after Hegel died. They definitely were greatly influenced by Hegel and the belief that the state is the height of collective immanence of culture.
They broke from Hegel in several major ways especially over any spiritual mystical Christian religious viewpoints.
They believed it was all 'NATURE". Feuerbach was a Hegelist that was a minister's son who rebelled against Christianity and said all theology has to become anthropology and religious conversation should become 'political conversation'. He greatly influenced Marx and Engel's. Kierkegaard was aware of all this new collectivistic thinking and adamantly opposed it. Dostoevsky was a Marxist for awhile and after he was sent to a Siberian camp he changed and became a Christian. He was a well read man and new of many of the issues of the day. Charles Darwin published "Origin of the Species' in 1857 and social Darwinism immediately began to be written about.
The strong survive and the weak perish begin to be viewed in political ideologies and Dostoevsky begin to stand up for Christian and Platonic perspectives in his writings. This is when he wrote 'Notes from the Underground" He recognized that secularization was in process based on 2 plus 2 logic and freedom was going to be defined without spirituality and conscience. He saw 'The Herd man' coming in the arms of the STATE with a compromised church system embracing the secular with religious robes.
I see post modernism as a world below collapsing into chaos that eventually will result in a great totalitarian state replacing universals with its own steel agenda.

poem by Joseph Narusiewicz
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He Mourned His Master

INTRODUCTION
The theme is ancient as the hills,
With all their prehistoric glory;
But yet of Corney and his friend,
We’ve often longed to tell the story;
And should we jar the reader’s ear,
Or fail to please his eye observant,
We only trust that he’ll forgive
The bush muse and—your humble servant.

THE STORY

Old Corney built in Deadman’s Gap
A hut, where mountain shades grow denser,
And there he lived for many years,

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poem by Henry Lawson
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Meditation On Saviors

I
When I considered it too closely, when I wore it like an element
and smelt it like water,
Life is become less lovely, the net nearer than the skin, a
little troublesome, a little terrible.

I pledged myself awhile ago not to seek refuge, neither in death
nor in a walled garden,
In lies nor gated loyalties, nor in the gates of contempt, that
easily lock the world out of doors.

Here on the rock it is great and beautiful, here on the foam-wet
granite sea-fang it is easy to praise
Life and water and the shining stones: but whose cattle are the
herds of the people that one should love them?

If they were yours, then you might take a cattle-breeder's
delight in the herds of the future. Not yours.
Where the power ends let love, before it sours to jealousy.
Leave the joys of government to Caesar.

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poem by Robinson Jeffers
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Let It Grow

Morning comes, she follows the path to the river shore,
Lightly sung, her song is the latch on the mornings door.
See the sun sparkle in the reeds, silver beads, pass into the sea.
She comes from a town where they call her the woodcutters daughter,
Shes brown as the bank where she kneels down to gather her water, and
She bears it away with a love that the river has taught her.
Let it flow, greatly grow, wide and clear.
Round and round, the cut of the plow in the furrowed field,
Seasons round, the bushels of corn and the barley meal,
Broken ground, open and beckoning to the spring,
Black dirt live again!
The plowman is broad as the back of the land he is sowing,
As he dances the circular track of the plow ever knowing
That the work of his day measures more than the planting and growing
Let it grow, let it grow, greatly yield.
What shall we say, shall we call it by a name,
As well to count the angels dancing on a pin.
Water bright as the sky from which it came,
And the name is on the earth that takes it in.
We will not speak but stand inside the rain,

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song performed by Grateful Dead
Added by Lucian Velea
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The Magnificent

SOME wit, handsome form and gen'rous mind;
A triple engine prove in love we find;
By these the strongest fortresses are gained
E'en rocks 'gainst such can never be sustained.
If you've some talents, with a pleasing face,
Your purse-strings open free, and you've the place.
At times, no doubt, without these things, success
Attends the gay gallant, we must confess;
But then, good sense should o'er his actions rule;
At all events, he must not be a fool.
The stingy, women ever will detest;
Words puppies want;--the lib'ral are the best.

A Florentine, MAGNIFICENT by name,
Was what we've just described, in fact and fame;
The title was bestowed upon the knight,
For noble deeds performed by him in fight.
The honour ev'ry way he well deserved;
His upright conduct (whence he never swerved,)
Expensive equipage, and presents made,

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poem by La Fontaine
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Of Hell And The Estate of Those Who Perish

hus, having show'd you what I see
Of heaven, I now will tell
You also, after search, what be
The damned wights of hell.

And O, that they who read my lines
Would ponder soberly,
And lay to heart such things betimes
As touch eternity.

The sleepy sinner little thinks
What sorrows will abound
Within him, when upon the brinks
Of Tophet he is found.

Hell is beyond all though a state
So doubtful[10] and forlorn,
So fearful, that none can relate
The pangs that there are born.

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poem by John Bunyan
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The Clergyman’s First Tale: Love is Fellow-service

A youth and maid upon a summer night
Upon the lawn, while yet the skies were light,
Edmund and Emma, let their names be these,
Among the shrubs within the circling trees,
Joined in a game with boys and girls at play:
For games perhaps too old a little they;
In April she her eighteenth year begun,
And twenty he, and near to twenty-one.
A game it was of running and of noise;
He as a boy, with other girls and boys
(Her sisters and her brothers), took the fun;
And when her turn, she marked not, came to run,
‘Emma,’ he called, then knew that he was wrong,
Knew that her name to him did not belong.
Her look and manner proved his feeling true,
A child no more, her womanhood she knew;
Half was the colour mounted on her face,
Her tardy movement had an adult grace.
Vexed with himself, and shamed, he felt the more
A kind of joy he ne’er had felt before.

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poem by Arthur Hugh Clough from Mari Magno or Tales on Board
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Hermann And Dorothea - IV. Euterpe

MOTHER AND SON.

THUS the men discoursed together; and meanwhile the mother
Went in search of her son,--at first in front of the dwelling
On the bench of stone, for he was accustom'd to sit there.
When she found him not there, she went to look in the stable,
Thinking perchance he was feeding his splendid horses, the stallions
Which he had bought when foals, and which he entrusted to no one.
But the servant inform'd her that he had gone to the garden.
Then she nimbly strode across the long double courtyard,
Left the stables behind, and the barns all made of good timber,
Enter'd the garden which stretch'd far away to the walls of the borough,
Walk'd across it, rejoicing to see how all things were growing,
Carefully straighten'd the props, on which the apple-tree's branches,
Heavily loaded, reposed, and the weighty boughs of the pear-tree,
Took a few caterpillars from off the strong-sprouting cabbage;
For a bustling woman is never idle one moment.
In this manner she came to the end of the long-reaching garden,
Where was the arbour all cover'd with woodbine: she found not her son there,
Nor was he to be seen in any part of the garden.

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poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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