Becoming One With Life @becomingonewithlife - Tumblr Blog

We go from day to day, one day much like the next, and then on a certain day all unannounced we come upon a man or we see this man who is perhaps already know to us and is a man like all men but who makes a certain gesture of himself that is like the piling of one’s goods upon an altar and in this gesture we recognize that which is buried in our hearts and is never truly lost to us nor ever can be and it is this moment, you see. This same moment. It is this which we long for and are afraid to seek and which alone can save us.

The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy (via becomingonewithlife)

I think the truth is always simple. It has pretty much got to be. It needs to be simple enough for a child to understand. Otherwise it'd be too late. By the time you figured it out it would be too late.

No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy

#cormac mccarthy #lit #no country for old men

When we unite and act together on the industrial field and when we vote together on election day we shall develop the supreme power of the one class that can and will bring permanent peace to the world. We shall then have the intelligence, the courage and the power for our great task. In due time industry will be organized on a cooperative basis. We shall conquer the public power. We shall then transfer the title deeds of the railroads, the telegraph lines, the mines, mills and great industries to the people in their collective capacity; we shall take possession of all these social utilities in the name of the people. We shall then have industrial democracy. We shall be a free nation whose government is of and by and for the people. And now for all of us to do our duty! The clarion call is ringing in our ears and we cannot falter without being convicted of treason to ourselves and to our great cause. Do not worry over the charge of treason to your masters, but be concerned about the treason that involves yourselves. Be true to yourself and you cannot be a traitor to any good cause on earth. Yes, in good time we are going to sweep into power in this nation and throughout the world. We are going to destroy all enslaving and degrading capitalist institutions and re-create them as free and humanizing institutions. The world is daily changing before our eyes. The sun of capitalism is setting; the sun of socialism is rising. It is our duty to build the new nation and the free republic. We need industrial and social builders. We Socialists are the builders of the beautiful world that is to be. We are all pledged to do our part. We are inviting—aye challenging you this afternoon in the name of your own manhood and womanhood to join us and do your part. In due time the hour will strike and this great cause triumphant—the greatest in history—will proclaim the emancipation of the working class and the brotherhood of all mankind.

The Canton, Ohio speech by Eugene V. Debs

#eugene v. debs #speech #veteran's day #armistice day

gorgeous

#pink siifu #stay sane #listen

#cormac mccarthy #blood meridian #lit

it's a bounce pass, have faith in the follow-through

#milo #euclid #nostrum grocers #listen

There is but one world and everything that is imaginable is necessary to it. For this world also which seems to us a thing of stone and flower and blood is not a thing at all but is a tale. And all in it is a tale and each tale the sum of all lesser tales and yet these are also the selfsame tale and contain as well all else within them. So everything is necessary. Every least thing. This is the hard lesson. Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hid from us, you see. The joinery. The way in which the world is made. We have no way to know what could be taken away. What omitted. We have no way to tell what might stand and what might fall. And those seams that are hid from us are of course in the tale itself and the tale has no abode or place of being except in the telling only and there it lives and makes its home and therefore we can never be done with the telling. Of the telling there is no end. And…in whatever other place by whatever other name or by no name at all I say again all tales are one. Rightly heard all tales are one.

The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy

#the crossing #cormac mccarthy #lit

I agreed with him that there wasnt a whole lot good you could say about old age and he said he knew one thing and I said what is that. And he said it dont last long. I waited for him to smile but he didnt.

No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy

#cormac mccarthy #lit #born on this day #no country for old men

becomingonewithlife

“And after and for a long time to come he’d have reason to evoke the recollection of those smiles and to reflect upon the good will which provoked them for it had power to protect and to confer honor and to strengthen resolve and it had power to heal men and to bring them to safety long after all other resources were exhausted.”

— All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

Breath

Who hears the humming of rocks at great height, the long steady drone of granite holding together, the strumming of obsidian to itself? I go among the stones stooping and pecking like a sparrow, imagining the glacier’s final push resounding still. In a freezing mountain stream, my hand opens scratched and raw and flutters strangely, more like an animal or wild blossom in wind than any part of me. Great fields of stone stretching away under a slate sky, their single flower the flower of my right hand. Last night the fire died into itself black stick by stick and the dark came out of my eyes flooding everything. I slept alone and dreamed of you in an old house back home among your country people, among the dead, not any living one besides yourself. I woke scared by the gasping of a wild one, scared by my own breath, and slowly calmed remembering your weight beside me all these years, and here and there an eye of stone gleamed with the warm light of an absent star. Today in this high clear room of the world, I squat to the life of rocks jewelled in the stream or whispering like shards. What fears are still held locked in the veins till the last fire, and who will calm us then under a gold sky that will be all of earth? Two miles below on the burning summer plains, you go about your life one more day. I give you almond blossoms for your hair, your hair that will be white, I give the world my worn-out breath on an old tune, I give it all I have and take it back again.

— Philip Levine (January 10, 1928 - February 14, 2015)

#philip levine #poetry

I saw Angel Olsen for the fourth and fifth time this month. Tumblr is the place where I originally discovered her all those years ago and I pretty much only do new posts now when I’ve seen her so it seemed appropriate to mark the occasion with one.

Night 1 highlights: “Some Things Cosmic,” “Lights Out,” “I Found a Reason” (Velvet Underground cover, video from a show on tour last month) Night 2 highlights: “Sans,” “Windows,” “Acrobat” Both night highlights: “Unfucktheworld,” “Shut Up Kiss Me,” “Give it Up,” “Heart Shaped Face”

It’s been an incredibly challenging year. This was a nice way to end it.

#angel olsen #listen

Philip Levine reading “Let Me Begin Again” at his inaugural reading as US Poet Laureate

Let me begin again as a speck of dust caught in the night winds sweeping out to sea. Let me begin this time knowing the world is salt water and dark clouds, the world is grinding and sighing all night, and dawn comes slowly and changes nothing. Let me go back to land after a lifetime of going nowhere. This time lodged in the feathers of some scavenging gull white above the black ship that docks and broods upon the oily waters of your harbor. This leaking freighter has brought a hold full of hayforks from Spain, great jeroboams of dark Algerian wine, and quill pens that can't write English. The sailors have stumbled off toward the bars of the bright houses. The captain closes his log and falls asleep. 1/10'28. Tonight I shall enter my life after being at sea for ages, quietly, in a hospital named for an automobile. The one child of millions of children who has flown alone by the stars above the black wastes of moonless waters that stretched forever, who has turned golden in the full sun of a new day. A tiny wise child who this time will love his life because it is like no other.

#poetry #philip levine